Native became the first in Brazil to achieve the ROC international certification – Regenerative Organic Certified™ in Regenerative Organic Agriculture. The certificate established in 2017 authenticates food, textile, and personal care raw materials companies that effectively contribute to sustainability while producing and, at the same time, regenerating soil health, valuing animal welfare, and generating dignity for rural workers. “Legitimating regenerative organic practices is an important way to create long-term solutions to problems such as the climate crisis, factory farming, and outdated rural practices”, says Leontino Balbo Júnior, Native´s executive vice president.

Regenerative agriculture integrates several agricultural techniques that seek to reconcile the need for productivity in the field with the need to preserve natural resources, generating benefits such as soil fertility regeneration, increased biodiversity in farmed areas, recovery and preservation of water resources, and carbon sequestration. This set of environmental benefits is known as “Ecosystem Services”. In other words, an agricultural production system is only considered effectively regenerative if it manifests the ability to provide ecosystem services to local and surrounding ecosystems and society as a whole.

 Therefore, it is not a matter of announcing its practices, but of presenting concrete results, duly measured and audited. Healthy soil helps to improve crop yields, making them more resistant to extreme weather conditions and reducing the need for external inputs, thus embedding another important sustainability pillar: Circular Economy. “For over 35 years, Native has been developing and applying organic production techniques that regenerate, revitalize, and positively impact its entire farming area thus balancing the need for food production with environmental preservation,” explains Balbo.

ROC Pillars - The ROC certification assessment process focuses on three important pillars, which help to balance production and sustainability:

• Soil health: takes into account the increase in organic matter and life in the soil over time and carbon sequestration;
• Animal welfare: how the company helps generate favorable conditions for animal life and biodiversity enhancement;
• Social justice: offering economic stability and dignity to farmers, ranchers, and rural workers, benefiting society as a whole.

“The certification is an important validation of Native holistic work in these past recent years, in addition to positioning the company as the first in Brazil to use all its knowledge to produce healthy foods while regenerating the necessary natural resources to the survival of future generations”, concludes Native´s executive vice president.

Sustainability - Sustainability has been showing itself as a hot topic every day. But is it possible to distinguish those who use the subject as a Greenwash from those who actually practice it daily?

Throughout its history, Native has always been at the forefront of sustainability. It took several decades of research and major investments that helped create the “Cane Verde Project” (The Green Sugarcane Project), a sustainable system for growing sugarcane free of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, and pioneering sugarcane harvesting without burning.

In this way, the land cultivated by Native underwent a restoration process that resulted in many benefits for nature. Restoration of the active biostructure of the soil created conditions for its recolonization by ancestral living organisms (biota) and improved the water cycle, generating clean water free of hundreds of contaminants common to intensive chemical agriculture. And the food web reconstitutes itself where there is water and living soil, favorable conditions that helped to create a perfect environment for different species of animals to settle in the region. A survey carried out by Embrapa Satellite Monitoring identified more than 340 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, 49 of which are threatened with extinction.

Producing sustainably while regenerating the environment for future generations is part of our commitment to nature.

Native. We are pioneers in regenerating nature.

Click here and learn more about Organic Products and Regenerative Organic Farming.