Our sustainability strategy sets out our sustainability goals, and targets across our business.
We target the shared sustainable development aims that matter most to our stakeholders and are important to the future of our business.
We are a pioneer in livestock breeding aimed at accelerating animal genetic improvement. We help farmers remove the guesswork in selecting the best animals for breeding by identifying and selecting ‘desirable’ animal ‘traits’ for animal wellbeing, productivity, reduced GHG emissions and resilience to disease.
Delivering economic value
'Desirable' traits are linked to multiple animal characteristics including how efficiently feed can be turned into meat or milk, and the quality of the milk and meat produced. They can also influence an animal’s health, robustness, rate of growth and fertility. This has the potential to deliver considerable economic value per animal, by improving feed efficiency, meat and milk quality, animal wellbeing and reducing 'time to market'.
By offering our customers economic value from the use of genetics that consume fewer natural resources and produce more protein, we also address the risks and opportunities that matter to our customers and other stakeholders, who share our vision of how further genetic improvement can help reduce GHG emissions and make our food production systems more resilient and sustainable.
Global focus, local action
Whilst our focus is global, Genus works directly with farms and food producers of all sizes from facilities in over 20 countries worldwide. This local presence allows us oversight of the welfare of our animals and ability to understand and respond to local concern for climate action, biodiversity improvement and community engagement.
To meet this expectation we're building a community of sustainability champions across our business and establishing formal sustainability-related responsibilities into 'traditional' job roles such as supply chain, procurement, legal, finance and facilities management.
Our strategy over time
We have short, medium and long-term strategic time-horizons for our business and our research and development operations:
Short-term business priorities - (0-3 years' time horizon)
Our work focuses on accelerating animal genetic improvement relating to efficiency of production, health, robustness, fertility and welfare – with an emphasis on enhancing the accuracy of these outcomes. We are also focused on reducing our carbon footprint of our own operations around the world.
Medium-term business priorities - (0-5 years' time horizon)
We focus on demonstrating the benefits to the animal protein supply chain that can be achieved through our gene-editing work, such as our research programme to combat the PRRS virus, and we are exploring how we transition our business model to succeed in a low carbon economy.
Long-term business priorities - (0-20 years' time horizon)
We have harnessed data and learning around specific climate related threats and opportunities to develop products and services which offer our customers superior levels of genetic resilience and productivity. We are also evaluating emerging carbon reduction strategies and technologies, including those which are yet to become commercially viable.
Sustainable protein production