Ashley Swan, commercial executive at First Milk, said: “We needed a lot of data to support this and we really needed to start understanding every single thing about the farms with an easy input for farmers.
In terms of keeping Nestle executives on board, Mr Ryan said visits to farms are a key part of driving that culture shift and showing the programme’s potential to contribute towards the firm’s science-based climate targets.
The data also aims to track which regenerative interventions are – and are not – working as farmers carry out worm counts or test water holding capacity and levels of carbon in the soil.
The co-operative is also gathering data on the amount of carbon measured in the soil on farms, starting with baseline measurements taken by the firm Agricarbon in 2021 – the first-of-its-kind soil carbon capture project.
Mr Smith said that while the programme provides a baseline level of practices for farmers to role out, its flexibility is also crucial.
