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How much do you pay you farmers?
You said in a facebook post once that the milk farmers are underpayed which (among other things) contributed to the cow milk prizes being cheeper than oat milk prizes. How much do you pay your farmers and what relation do you have with them? How do you value your partnerships?
Asa
143 Messages
2 years ago
Hi Milla,
Thank you for your questions, very interesting topic.
Much to your point we wish to value the farmers providing our main ingredient! We don't grow our own oats but purchase from oat suppliers who in turn pay the farmers. We believe all farmers are absolute key in the shift we need to make towards more plant-based food production and consumption. Today's livestock production has a significant climate impact and we believe more investments are needed towards sustainable farming to serve both farmers and the planet!
To support this, we're involved in a couple of projects investigating what a future farm could look like - for example using the land smarter to feed a growing population. And Adam at Jannelunds Gård in Sweden did just this! We partnered up with him a few years back (together with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences). He started growing more plant-based food for humans rather than feed to animals and the results were so positive (the farm could feed nearly three times as many persons compared to before) that we decided to sponsor more farmers the same way (you can read more about this here). There's also quite a cool regenerative farming project going on in the US that you can dig into here.
As a an oat company we're (obviously) keen on promoting cultivation of oats in other ways too. We're long term sponsors of ScanOats at Lund University in Sweden and in that same spirit we're in the process of establishing a science and innovation center in Lund with scientists leading the work to create innovative oat-based foods!
Hope you found all this useful. All in all, there's lots of potential in oats! Please don't hesitate to get back to us with more thoughts or questions.
All the best,
Åsa at Oatly
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