Landor: Lowering the carbon footprint of fertilizer

Lowering the carbon footprint of fertilizer: Landor

Landor, a Swiss fertilizer business and part of the fenaco cooperative, is cutting the emissions tied to the fertilizer it supplies to their farmers. It does this by replacing part of its conventional nitrogen fertilizer with verified lower-carbon alternatives.

Same product in the field, lower emissions upstream

The lower-carbon products are chemically the same as the conventional ones and perform the same way in the field. Farmers change nothing about how they work. The only difference sits upstream, in how the fertilizer is made, where the lower-carbon products carry far fewer production emissions.

The project quantifies the reduction in carbon intensity across all the nitrogen fertilizer Landor supplies and allocates it to the specific crops grown with that fertilizer, such as potatoes, wheat and sugar beets. Those verified reductions are then passed to the food companies that source those crops, so they can account for them in their Scope 3 supply chain reporting.

How the accounting holds up

The project runs under Proba methodology PM.0002, Adoption of low-emission fertilizer strategies to transition to low-carbon agriculture, and follows the Proba Standard. It uses a mass-balance approach, the same accounting model used across food and materials supply chains, to track the lower-carbon volumes without physically separating them. Total allocated reductions can never exceed the verified pool, and each reduction is issued once and retired when claimed, which prevents double counting. Independent validation and verification is carried out by an approved third-party body.

Fertilizer emissions are often written off as something a company cannot influence. Landor shows otherwise: the product stays the same, the farming stays the same, and the reduction is verified and allocated to the crops it belongs to. If you want to know what that would mean for your Scope 3 numbers, we are happy to walk you through it.