We started out on our journey with groups mainly in the UK and Europe, focussed around key produce areas in salad, fruit and vegetable production. The success of these initial groups paved the way for numerous groups covering in over 30 crop types across a number of countries and regions globally. This brings growers together from across the globe to discuss best practice in their crop area, helping to drive continual improvement. 

Crop Action Groups

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is central to the way we work in CAGs and the Sainsbury’s crop protection approach. IPM means that alternative strategies, such as disease resistant varieties and biological control, should be considered first. However, we also recognise that careful, safe and appropriate use of professionally chosen plant protection products can be needed, and is part of the IPM tool kit. Through the use of IPM, alternative solutions and new innovation, where possible, we encourage our Growers to drive forward best practice and minimise the use of pesticides.

Within our CAGs, learning from each other and the use of data is key.  Data analysis can help us to identify crop protection and production concerns before they are problems. We can then work with our CAGs to better understand the risks, and more effectively manage issues. As an example, crop protection product approvals are highly regulated and subject to regular reviews. When approvals change we are able to act quickly and efficiently working with our CAGs globally to look at how these changes can be best implemented, monitored and managed within IPM systems. The smarter use of data, and working together to share our learnings and experience, is becoming increasingly important to help us to understand and support best practice and surety of supply.  

Interaction Groups

Following on from our fruitful CAG heritage, we have also launched additional routes to collaborate with our growers and suppliers, recognising that some innovation and developments spans across crop types (e.g. the environment and soils). This led initially to the development of Grower Interaction Groups (GIGs) and more recently interaction groups working together to help support and deliver our Better For the Planet goals

These groups bring growers and suppliers from different areas together to share experience, identify new thinking and advance best practice. They are typically a dynamic mix of discussion, interaction and activity. Examples have included; smarter use of biological control, assessing the health of our soils and novel pest management approaches. 

“Slugs are a major crop pest. In the UK and potential losses have been estimated to be over £50 million per annum in cereals, oilseeds and vegetable crops alone. We have worked with researchers, crop protection companies and our suppliers and growers to better understand slug behaviour and to encourage the use of a range of IPM based crop protection approaches to their management.”. 

Biological control typically involves the use of natural enemies to control pests. Working with a group of our berry suppliers and leading industry experts, we have been running a pilot project examining how use of data can help to support greater use of biological control systems within IPM - potentially reducing the reliance on traditional crop protection products.

Looking at soil health we have recently also worked with NIAB and Yara to help our orchard crop growers. This looked at how a soil health score card developed in field crops and grass might be adapted to use in an orchard. Soil Health is not only important for biodiversity and IPM, but also for soil carbon, net zero goals and the long-term sustainability of resilient farming systems.