We are blasting through our planetary boundaries. Most significant are climate change, loss of biodiversity and dramatically disturbed nitrogen cycles in our soils. But we are not only confronted with a planetary overshoot. Growing populism is a clear sign that we are also beginning to feel the consequences of a social shortfall caused by a growing wealth gap. English economist Kate Raworth has compared our so-called ‘free market’ economy with a cuckoo’s young that parasitizes on people and the planet. She advocates an economy that stays within the boundaries of our ecological ceiling and our social foundations.

The SDGs can guide us to achieve this. In his wedding cake model, Swedish scientist Johan Rockström allocated all planet-related SDGs to the first layer, all people-related SDGs to the middle layer and all economic SDGs to the top layer of the cake. It reveals a logical sequence: The impact on our planet is defined by the way we structure our society. And the way we structure society is defined by the way we define wealth or profit. As long as we say people & planet are important, but we also need to make a profit, then profit will always win and people & planet will lose. After all, you will always be cheaper and more competitive in the market if you pass on the costs of people and planet to future generations.

If you look at it from a different angle, we seem to have lost the connection between profit and purpose. Nobody wakes up in the morning to say, ok let’s exploit some kids in the Far East and destroy biodiversity. Yet, it is happening. Every day. As long as we do not address the perverse incentive that originates in this weird definition of profit, we will not solve the problem. This triple bottom line thinking - people planet profit - is definitely bankrupt. We have to talk about profit. And profit only. But then let’s calculate properly, and start including the cost of natural and social capital from the very beginning.

Some call this the threefold divide: the ecological divide that separates us from nature, the social divide that separates us from one another and the spiritual divide that separates us from ourselves.

A new profit definition is being piloted in Bhutan: the Gross National Happiness Index that includes not just financial but also ecological, social and cultural wealth and New Zealand is experimenting with a similar approach. But it is also being piloted right under our nose, particularly in the UK and The Netherlands, where we are taking it from a slightly different but probably even more exciting angle. It is driven by our financial sector. Both Mark Carney as well as Klaas Knot, our central bank presidents who also chair the Financial Stability Board, have started to implement social and ecological performance indicators in their financial risk models. Sustainability is being integrated in the RAROCs, the risk-adjusted return on capital. To cut a long story short: dirty companies form more of an investment risk than cleaner companies. It will be more difficult for dirty companies to attract capital in future. Bye bye triple A rating Shell. Sustainability seems to be breaking out of its green bubble and to be trickling down into the DNA of our financial sector.

Now please allow me to briefly introduce an example of how we implement this in our business practice of the food & agriculture market.

We provide all our products with a label that carries the grower’s face and that reveals the origin, because we know there is no sustainability without transparency. The label includes a QR code that consumers can scan with their smartphone. You then get access to the grower’s unique story and his impact on people and planet. We use three indicators for social and four for ecological impact. The indicators are obviously aligned with market standards. Plus we have aligned them with the SDGs.

We Measure the impact, together with stakeholders we Manage the incremental steps of development towards more sustainability. We also Market the social and eco system contributions. Because – as growers say: how can we be green if our figures are red. This, by the way, we consider the most challenging task of our sector: to reward our producers with a premium for their social and eco system services in an uneven playing field where competition gets away with a lower price as a result of passing on social and ecological costs to other generations.

Some time ago we decided to add a fourth M: We decided to not only monitor, manage and market the social and ecological impact, but also to Monetize it. We realize that you cannot monetize everything. But we have also realized that if we want to address the perverse incentive that lies in a devastating, short-term profit definition, there was no way around monetization. In order to achieve this, we teamed up with various partners from the private and public sector to launch the Pilot for True Cost Accounting in Food, Farming and Finance. The objective was to develop one sustainability dashboard that could be used to share the true cost of food on a per hectare basis with farmers, on a per kilo basis with consumers and on a corporate profit & loss account basis with financial institutions. In order to keep it simple and pragmatic, we selected 20% of the performance indicators that define 80% of the impact: soil, water, climate, health and living wages.

I would like to finish this presentation with a few examples of how we communicated this in the market. Take soil fertility. You obviously can’t monetize fertility but you can monetize organic matter content in soils, which seems a good indicator for soil life. Based on FAO monetization models, the financial auditor EY has calculated that this organic avocado grower contributes 240 euro per hectare per year, whereas his conventional neighbour is losing soil organic matter at a rate of 1160 euro per hectare per year. As a result of chemical fertilizer, he may have a slightly better yield - but it comes at the expense of soil depletion. This example confirms that organic is not too expensive, but conventional is too cheap as long as we keep ignoring the cost of ecological damage. And we are not yet even talking about better water-holding capacity of good soils, or their mitigating effect on greenhouse gases, their ability to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or their beneficial effect on pest and disease resistance of the crop.

This is how we have visualized it for consumers. And this is how we have campaigned for it on the retail shelves. The soil is the limit, not the sky. Organic is a soilution. And you, dear customer, can become a soildier by pulling out a pavement stone and starting a guerrilla farm. A bit of compost and basil seeds are all you need and we have provided it to you, along with the tomatoes. Now if you pull out this pavement stone, make sure you do this somewhere illegal, ideally whilst the police is trying to stop you and then post the footage on YouTube. And then you can win a prize. In this campaign we have teamed up with over 200 NGOs and many VIPs who have started these tiny guerrilla gardens. That has helped putting the soil issue on the radar.

Here are a few more examples for water, climate and health. For health, we have applied the DALY monetization model (Disability Adjusted Life Years) developed by the WHO. We applied it to chemical residue incident data recorded by EFSA, and then EY calculated that organic apples, for instance, are 19cts healthier than conventional apples. That corresponds with 27 sick days per hectare per year.

To cut a long story short: we have accumulated the monetization data for all our products throughout the entire supply chain and consolidated this in a new profit & loss account. We may still be a long way from having figured it all out, however, one thing seems unavoidable: In tomorrow’s economy, companies will be held accountable for their impact on natural and social capital. If not by their values, customers, stakeholders, then by capital providers and their risk managers.

With this panel we open the fifth Farm & Food in Berlin. Look beyond the Field! Our speakers raise questions and invite you to join us in Berlin on 20 January to look for answers. Are the technologies used today really helpful? What is behind the hype of alternative proteins?

Do we have to, can we save agriculture by focusing on methods like regenerative agriculture? Today the agricultural business is not only confronted with everyday problems, but also with new and growing demands from consumers and industry. The first panel will present our main topics of the day through keynotes and discussions.

Today remote sensing technologies in combination with spatial analysis methods are becoming safe, accurate and cost-effective aids in agriculture. Sensors on systems such as satellites, drones or machines provide digital images and big data, which can be used to obtain knowledge about soil and plants in field and region area-wide, faster and more objectively than with conventional inspections. Who benefits from this information? Are they equally useful for farmers, industry, agricultural policy and society and what are the benefits for these user groups?

The ideal is for farmers to use sensor data to make better targeted field management decisions, to automate and document processes such as fertilisation and crop protection, to save resources and protect the environment. The agricultural industry supports this approach and offers farmers not only the means of production but also satellite imagery maps of their field zones of adapted application. Authorities use satellite technologies to steer field management in the interests of agricultural policy and the environment. And for society, objective information about the cultivation of agricultural raw materials and the traceability of products from farm to field can lead to more confidence in agriculture.

This discussion will look at different applications of remote sensing and big data in crop production and question the benefits of practical application for farmers, industry, agricultural policy and society, today and in the future.

Trade digitally, harvest success. Grain trade 4.0.
Hosted by cropspot.

Our future lies in the soil. CO2-binding through regenerative methods.
Hosted by indigo.

Look what's crawling! Insects as a source of protein and a link in the circular economy.
Hosted by Hermetia Baruth.

Agtech resources in Silicon Valley. What German Agtech companies should consider when scaling into the US.
Hosted by California Business Associates.

Major international reports agree that our way of producing food must become more sustainable. This cannot be achieved by 1. yesterday's methods, but only with new approaches, since today's circumstances have never existed before (size of the world's population, globalised trade, climate change) and 2. will not succeed with one or a couple but only with a whole set of solutions. One possible approach is more precise breeding with genome editing.

Whether this new technology can contribute to greater sustainability in agriculture depends on a number of external factors: For which agricultural practice is it used? How differentiated does regulation deal with the very different applications? What about consumer acceptance?

Finally, the question is how it will affect Europe and its place in the world if technology becomes standard in other countries. What problems will trade, producers and consumers face? What do these groups expect from politics?

Green Revolution: Is Genome Editing ready to save agriculture?
Hosted by KWS

How can a community-driven model provide benefits for upstream value chain actors?
Hosted by Supercoop.

The lack of funding in Germany makes life difficult for innovators. There is a lack of capital, investors, partnerships and networks. We ask: How can we build an ecosystem for innovation in Agtech in Germany? Who and what is necessary for this?

In a participative workshop, we want to use fishbowl discussion and dynamic facilitation techniques to develop the necessary foundations and, together with our participants, derive a starting paper for a subsequent workshop. The format leaves no room for PR and extensive contributions by a small number of people. It takes place in two chair circles, with the outer circle listening and the inner circle discussing. One chair always remains free. After the introduction to the format, our partners from the areas of startup, banks, VC and CVC, state sponsors, knowledge providers give their 2-3 minute impulses, then further discussion takes place. But the audience can take a chair at any time.

The target groups are startups, funding institutions such as banks and state funding programmes, VCs and CVs, knowledge providers and consultants, incubators and accelerators. Participants max: 40 persons