Why It's Important That Farmers Earn Enough Money

Farmers are at the beginning of most products that we humans come into contact with. Our food and our clothes almost all start with dedicated farmers. They have always been under pressure to produce as many products for as little as possible. Even in The Netherlands (where we’re from), farmers take their tractors to the street because it's harder and harder to earn a living as a farmer.

Farming and Biodiversity
Biodiversity stands for the variety of life and plants on earth. High biodiversity means more crops and species and less biodiversity means the opposite. Simply put; if you have less biodiversity more species and crops will go extinct, thus we will have fewer resources on the planet. 

Since we humans have been working on farming, monoculture (i.e. specialization of cultivating only one crop) has steadily grown. The side effects of this were always minimal due to there not being that many people on the planet. Now that there are a lot of people that need goods that are coming from natural resources, biodiversity is under threat worldwide. 

Farmers hold the key
Farmers have the largest effect on biodiversity from all of us humans. Whether its water usage, land usage or crop cultivation; farmers make important decisions that directly have an impact on the environment. This is where a new idea came to life:

We’ve teamed up with Nature^Squared to start a pilot, with which we will double the income of cotton farmers so that they can increase biodiversity through their farms. We will do this by giving a portion of every Iron Roots item sold directly to the farmers, without any middlemen. 

In the coming months, we will test with Nature Squared to see how we can maximize the impact through the cotton farmers. We will make plans with them to create more biodiversity and measure along the way how far the farmers have come. How exactly we are going to measure will become more clear as time passes, since every farmer has his own struggles. It would, for example, be unfair to force a farmer to increase biodiversity when he can’t even send his kids to school, so it's a delicate matter.

We'll keep you all updated on the progress we are making with this pilot!