It was a privilege to begin my week at the Annual In-Person Meeting of the Bayer Sustainability Council at the Damianshof in Rommerskirchen, a family farm cultivated by six successive generations of the Olligs family and today part of the Bayer ForwardFarming network.

The Bayer Sustainability Council is an independent body of external experts that advises the Board of Management and the company’s internal working groups on sustainability, convening in person each year to review progress and set direction. As a Member of the Council, I serve within its working group on climate and health, which examines how extreme heat, flooding and pressures on food systems affect the health of women and children across the continuum of care, and how health systems and communities can build resilience in response.

The Damianshof offered a fitting setting in which to open these deliberations. Set on deep loess soils of exceptional quality, the farm combines commercial production of wheat, sugar beet, potatoes, oilseed rape and barley with a rigorous programme of environmental stewardship, including flower strips and nesting habitats for pollinators and farmland birds, continuous weather monitoring to guide precise field decisions, dedicated systems for groundwater protection, and soil conservation techniques in potato cultivation that limit erosion and reduce the risk of flooding.

These are lessons of real value for farming communities across Africa, where the resilience of food production in a changing climate bears directly on maternal nutrition and newborn health, and I look forward to carrying them home to inform the community health and nutrition work of the Wellbeing Foundation Africa in Nigeria.

I extend my sincere thanks to Mr Bernd Olligs and his family for their generous hospitality and for sharing the knowledge of a farm stewarded with such care across generations, and to Bayer for convening a visit of great substance at the outset of the Council’s meeting.

 

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