Danone Is Encouraging French Farmers to Give their Cows French Feed

Danone Is Encouraging French Farmers to Give their Cows French Feed

The French agri-food giant is incentivizing their dairy-farmer partners to aim for cattle-feed autonomy on their farms.

Enabling French dairy farmers to give up Brazilian cattle cakes in favor of 100% French cattle feed: that is the goal Danone has set for itself in the framework of the AlimFrance project. As a first step, the agri-food giant has just signed an agreement with the Jura-Bresse Dairy Farmers Association, which has 78 members from the Franche-Comté region.

Concretely, the firm is offering individualized guidance to find the best solutions for achieving the goal of 100% French cattle feed. They are also paying a bonus of €15 per 1,000 liters (265 gallons) of milk, to compensate for the additional cost that will entail.

The point of the new policy is to reduce farmers’ vulnerability to volatile agricultural-commodity prices. The change will provide them with greater visibility and more control over production costs, as well as reducing their carbon footprint by stopping agricultural-commodity imports.

– Increasing Farmers’ Income by 15% –

“We are convinced that this kind of action will contribute to developing French food sovereignty. I am thrilled to be one of the first signers of the AlimFrance charter because it will allow us to create greater value for our members while also meeting today’s society’s expectations,”

Anthony Ecoiffier, president of the Jura-Bresse Dairy Farmers Association, proclaims with pride.

Christened “AlimFrance,” the new contract falls within the scope of Danone’s agricultural-transition strategy, which they invested €40 million into from 2016 to 2020. The firm hopes to have all of their dairy producers signed on by the end of the year 2021.

Since 2020, Danone has also promised to increase its 20,000 dairy-farmer partners’ disposable income by activating two levers. First off, by offering personalized advice for lowering production costs in order to increase disposable income by 15% by 2025. Next, by using price-calculation formulas that take production costs adapted to each collection region into account.

With over 800 million liters (2,100,000 gallons) of milk collected every year, “Danone milk” accounts for 3.5% of all milk collected in France.

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