When farmers choose to approach farming sustainably, it's usually a business decision.
They're listening to consumers who are demanding sustainably produced and environmentally friendly foods.
4/5 consumers in the EU say environmental issues around agriculture and the production of sustainable and healthy food are key priorities.
"The majority of companies in the food sector are interested in sustainability. And they have to be, because if they're not sustainable, they're not going to survive long-term," says Deborah Perkins, Global Head of Food & Agribusiness at ING.
Jan Klerken, founder and CEO of Scelta Mushrooms, which is one of the world's largest mushroom growers, says,
"For Scelta, sustainability has been a highly successful business model. It's helped the company evolve from a small mushroom grower in the Netherlands to an international business that exports mushrooms all over the world.
"In the beginning, there is more cost involved, and it takes time to implement these changes, but at the end of the day, sustainability is more resilient. Cheap is not always best, so instead of asking how I could save money, I asked how I could spend money to make my products more attractive."
Scelta aims to become "100% clean", and one way it's doing that is by embedding circular-economy principles in the different parts of the agricultural supply chain.
They're also focused on reducing waste by using discarded stems to produce mushroom concentrate, selling casing soil ingredients to the cosmetics industry, and re-using substrate as an animal feed ingredient.
Over a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated by agriculture, and if unchecked, these will continue to increase as the world's population grows.
