On October 12th, members of the GACSA Facilitation Unit and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs visited the headquarters of Koppert Biological Systems to discuss the company’s mission and its work on  climate-smart agriculture.

The company’s core business revolves around providing specialized agricultural knowledge  and expertise that is coupled with a range of biological products. These biological products aid in resilient cultivation, pest control, pollination, and seed treatments. Koppert does not sell chemical pesticide products, but rather their biological solutions revolve around unlocking the raw power of nature. From micro-organisms to beneficial insects and from bumblebees to to enhancing micro-biomes, Koppert’s ‘partnership with nature’ is predicated upon looking for innovative solutions already deployed in nature and harnessing them. The company’s activities directly impact each of the three pillars of climate-smart agriculture and they are striving to do even more to scale-up CSA.

The most striking part of the visit to Koppert was its focus on transformation of its business to effectively deal with the massive transformation that is occurring within the agricultural space across the world. Koppert is embracing a future where more is done with less and solutions will be specifically tailored down to the micro-level. Koppert now views itself as a knowledge company and this focus on knowledge is transforming Koppert.

Today, Koppert’s solutions are tailored around the micro-biomes of plants and small changes in those biomes can have an outsized affect on resilience and production. Deploying biological solutions for nutrient-dense, agricultural products being grown across the world takes significant amounts of research and development, coupled with knowledge about how to best deploy the derived solutions. The company is looking across the world for innovative, biological solutions because it realizes nature-based solutions can vary by location. To garner these solutions, Koppert is transforming itself to embrace a distributed solution and deployment system. It is empowering its subsidiaries and researchers across the world and it is building partnerships all across the agricultural value-chain to harness local solutions. Koppert sees promise in encouraging innovation and research coming from south/south cooperation and believes that these types of partnerships will provide significant benefits for scaling climate-smart agricultural too.

Koppert believes that almost the entirety of the agricultural value chain wants to embrace climate-smart agriculture, but many entities lack the requisite climate-smart expertise. The company believes it can play a pivotal role in providing climate-smart knowledge across the value chain and it views itself as an agricultural thought-leader whose strong partnerships across the agricultural space can be leveraged to have productive and frank dialogues on climate-smart issues. Koppert’s ‘partnership with nature’ is providing the world with climate-smart solutions and a blueprint for climate-smart innovation, partnership, and knowledge sharing.