One quarter of global land area–3.3 billion hectare–has been converted to food production, destroying ecosystems in the process.
Every year, pesticide use causes 3.5 to 5 million acute poisonings globally, especially among farmers and their families who are in direct contact with agrochemicals.
These hazards, along with a growing demand for organic foods, align to create a market opportunity for sustainable businesses in emerging economies. Two entrepreneurs in WRI’s New Ventures program have developed innovative ways to meet the demand:
Berni Labs
Making industrial agriculture safer, one farmer at a time.
Several years ago in Los Mochis, Mexico, an early morning fire in an agrochemical warehouse released massive amounts of toxic fumes into the environment, causing serious health problems for the local population. This was the first in a series of ecological disasters which convinced Jorge Berni, a longtime resident of the agriculture-based community, that farmers needed a safer solution for crop control than the heavily toxic pesticides upon which they relied.
Berni combined his training in chemical engineering with his twenty years of experience as an organic farmer to produce Bug Balancer. This chemical solution uses naturally-occurring pheromones to repel harmful pests that destroy farmers’ crops while attracting beneficial insects that are the natural predators of those pests.
Today, Berni Labs continues to succeed as it taps into a growing demand for organic crop cultivation in Mexico. The company’s 14 member team had its most lucrative year in 2005, generating nearly $1 million in sales by working with 17 distributors across the country. Berni Labs has also begun to expand its operations internationally, winning an enterprise competition with Mexico’s Ministry of Economics to receive government support for research and expansion into the Canadian market.
Bening Big Tree Farms
Combining the best of two worlds in agricultural practices.
In 1997, Benjamin and Blair Ripple traveled to Indonesia to learn more about the agricultural heritage and systems of traditional subsistence farmers. What they found however, were two highly flawed agricultural models that hurt farmers’ profits and their communities in the long term.
In some areas, large-scale systems had ravaged production capacities and tainted local water supplies with dangerous levels of pesticides. At the other extreme, the Ripples observed that still intact, traditional production practices were simply not profitable, when forced to work within a free enterprise market economy.
The two entrepreneurs decided to found Bening Big Tree Farms to combine the ecologically sustainable, long term crop yields of traditional agriculture with the economically sustainable returns of large-scale food production. This basic philosophy, aptly titled ECO2 drives the Big Tree Farms business model to this day.
The company works with organic farmers in the area, encouraging sustainability by spreading best practices for food production, such as crop diversification. Big Tree also brings efficiency and scale to these local producers by aggregating their supplies to create the scale necessary for bulk sales.
This innovative combination of diverse production models allows the company to offer high quality niche foods at extremely competitive prices; a strategy that is driving sales towards the company’s goal of breaking the million dollar revenue threshold in 2007.
Big Tree products are primarily targeted at the natural/organic foods market, which is growing at an impressive annual rate of 25 percent per annum. They currently supply large grocery chains such as Whole Foods and Central Markets, and plan to begin selling to mainstream supermarkets in the coming years.
