Promoting sustainable agriculture together with contract farmers and reducing water use in own production

Organisation: Anora Oyj

Time: 4/15/2015 – 12/31/2017

Description:

Anora is a leading wine and spirits company offering quality brands in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Anora produces, markets, sells, imports and exports alcoholic beverages in its market area. The key ingredients in our alcoholic beverage production are grain spirit distilled from Finnish barley, as well as pure groundwater.

The barley used for the production of ethanol at our Koskenkorva plant is bought from 1500 farms in the vicinity of the plant. The area cultivated by our contract farmers covers about 50 000 hectares, or 2,5 % of the total in Finland. We work together with our contract farmers to promote sustainable agricultural practices and to improve material efficiency. We have for example developed grain varieties together to achieve better process efficiency and to ensure no part of the valuable raw material goes to waste. Compliance with the Finnish Cereal Committee’s recommendations on good cultivation practices, covering for example the use of pesticides and nutrients, are an essential part of our contracts with our barley suppliers.

Our commitment to further promote sustainable agriculture:

– To encourage our contract farmers to adopt the new greener agricultural practices included in the new EU Common Agricultural Policy.
– To promote good practices in events directed at our contract farmers, as well as through our newsletter.
– To offer contract farmers a tool to support them in maintaining a correct nutrient balance, by adding information about the phosphorous and nitrogen levels of barley loads supplied to Anora into our farmer extranet.

To maintain the quality of groundwater used as an ingredient in our beverages, we protect our water abstraction facilities by owning land in the respective groundwater areas and establishing nature protection areas. For production purposes we use municipal water, for example for rinsing production lines. We continuously measure our water use as well as the quality of waste water in our own production.

Our commitment to preserve water quality and reduce water use:

– To reduce the amount of water used to wash bottling lines through improved production planning.
– To reduce our water use (m3 of water used per m3 of product)
– To improve waste water quality at most important production sites