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Unilever has joined forces with UK farms that cultivate mustard seeds and mint leaves for its Colman’s products, to introduce its first regenerative agriculture initiative in the country. This is the latest regenerative agriculture project from Unilever, building on its roadmap to invest in such practices on 1.5 million hectares of land and forests by 2030.

The project will begin by testing the implementation of regenerative agriculture practices on mustard and mint farms around Norwich and Peterborough over four years. This includes mustard farms that have been supplying Colman’s products for more than two centuries. The first crop of the programme is scheduled to take place next month. The initiative brings together Unilever and two farming cooperatives – the English Mustard Growers and Norfolk Mint Growers – alongside technical and academic partners, such as Farmacy and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB). It aims to tackle the challenges faced by these crops and landscapes by trialling new regenerative agriculture practices on these farms. These practices include using low-carbon fertilisers, crop nutrition strategies, planting of cover and companion crops to reduce pesticide use, new digital water irrigation scheduling systems and reduced cultivation. Unilever collaborated with the farms to collect and establish baseline data and create a framework that measures the impact of these new practices. This also includes collating information on soil health, fertiliser use, biodiversity, water efficiency and carbon reduction. Additionally, Unilever is supporting the development of new technologies to enhance on-farm data collection that will be able to measure carbon levels in soil in situ.

“As with all farmers, we are facing the challenges of climate change directly on our land," explained mustard farmer Michael Sly. "Alongside our English Mustard Growers Group, we’re on the journey with Unilever and NIAB to integrate regenerative agriculture practices that include strong measurement processes, to improve our yield, improve the soil health, and maintain the flavour of a fantastic product alongside that.” Mint farmer David Bond added: “To increase our resilience and continue to produce high quality products, we need to work with our climate, which means adapting our practices. This new project with Unilever will enable us to implement regenerative agriculture practices on a wider scale, together with more measurement and analysis from our partnership with NIAB, so we can continue to learn and improve for the future.”