04.11.22
Dr. Bronner’s, family-owned maker of one of the top-selling natural brands of soap in North America, has partnered with Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees, to finance the expansion of dynamic agroforestry in Ghana.
Coordinated with support from Dr. Bronner’s sister company in Ghana, Serendipalm, this project will convert 200 acres of arable land in Ghana to a mixed dynamic agroforestry model for product and full-scale demonstration of the concept to farmers and visitors. Managed and farmed by Serendipalm staff, this land will be used to cultivate cocoa, palm trees, and other crops to the highest bar fair trade and regenerative organic certified (ROC) standards. This will help equip and empower the rural community near Asuom, Ghana with the tools to diversify their crops, expand farmer incomes, and improve food security in the community while sequestering carbon in soil and trees, thus helping mitigate climate change impacts.
“We’re thrilled to have found a like-minded partner in Ecosia, a fellow B Corp with whom we share core values of environmental stewardship and the commitment to embracing real, tangible actions to combat climate change,” said Michael Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s. “Serendipalm is an exemplary regenerative organic agriculture project, and this expansion of acreage will achieve significant positive impacts for farmers, soil, and community.”
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, West Africa will see an increase in prolonged droughts, higher average temperatures and periodic flooding, threatening food security and ecological resiliency while exacerbating rural poverty. In addition to necessary actions to reduce consumption of fossil fuels and the pursuit of carbon capture technologies, regenerative agriculture remains a key solution for restoring and sequestering atmospheric carbon in soil, and nurturing a broader economic shift away from extraction-oriented production models.
Dynamic Agroforestry
Dynamic Agroforestry
In contrast to chemical-intensive monocrop models that are pervasive to the palm and cocoa industries worldwide, dynamic agroforestry is a farming model that simulates a natural forest. Dynamic agroforestry entails the stratified cultivation of a variety of trees and ground crops with various needs for sunlight, soil nutrients and other inputs, which are carefully planted together to optimize the output of the entire system, rather than the yield of a single species. The biodiversity of dynamic agroforestry models reduces the pest infestation that comes with monoculture plantations, thereby eliminating the need for chemical pesticides; and the dense and diverse plantings produce considerably more biomass per acre than do monocultures, resulting in sequestration of significant amounts of carbon dioxide in wood, also termed “carbon farming.”
Founded with support from Dr. Bronner’s Special Operations team in 2007, Serendipalm is a fair trade and ROC project in Asuom, Ghana, composed of more than 800 farmers who cultivate and produce the palm oil used in Dr. Bronner’s bar soaps, as well as cocoa for the brand’s Magic All-One Chocolate. Cultivation of an additional 200 acres, funded by this Dr. Bronner’s and Ecosia partnership, will allow for expansion of farmed crops to include food for local markets such as plantain and cassava, thereby increasing food security and long-term financial resiliency for farmers and their community. These crops are also sought by brands in the global North that need to source ROC ingredients for their products. Such brands pay a premium for fair trade, ROC ingredients and furthermore, they promote the concept of dynamic agroforestry to their customers.
“Serendipalm demonstrates the best of what agroforestry systems can achieve: the combination of more than 20 different trees can result in a considerable increase in income opportunities for farmers, soil quality improves significantly, the risk of crop failure is reduced, and large amounts of carbon are stored in the soil,” said Katharina Spethmann, head of social and economic sustainability at Ecosia. “The IPCC continues to sound the alarm that now is the time to take action on the climate crisis. For the agriculture industry, Serendipalm is a prime example that an investment in agroforestry is an investment in the community’s long-term economic health and climate resiliency.”