Crop Cooperative Center Zürcher Oberland
Small scale farms, which are interested in cultivating high protein plants, still face different challenges. Harvests of legume crops such as lentils, chickpeas or beans need to be dried and purified after threshing. Currently, there are only few stations in Switzerland that provide this service for small lot size harvests. Therefore, we want to establish a Crop Cooperative Center in the region of Zurich. The center will provide infrastructure for drying and purifying all types of crops.
Who are the people behind the project and what is your background?
Judith Frei works the farm together with her husband and a team. As environmental scientist and farmer, she tries to combine production systems with biodiversity and sustainability whenever possible.
As former sustainability & impact analyst, Martin Frei decided to leave the banking industry for making an impact at the farm together with his wife Judith.
Stephan Gysi is biologist by training and loves growing specialty crops. He has three years of experience in crop drying and processing.
How did your idea come into being?
After taking over our farm in January 2023, we started remodeling the crop rotation. Legume crops, that have been absent from our fields in the past, will play an increasingly important role. We started this year by growing lentils and were immediately confronted with problems. Not the growing itself was an obstacle but it was difficult to find places where the infrastructure for drying and purifying is available. We will also have to transport our harvest to different places until we will be able to obtain a marketable product. This is time consuming and ecologically as well as economically inefficient. We therefore concluded, that one of the big obstacles for farms wishing to grow such crops is the inaccessibility of the necessary infrastructure. If we want to promote diversification of field crops and offer interesting alternatives to animal husbandry to farms, the required infrastructure needs to be available as locally as possible.
What is your idea to impactfully design a climate positive FOODprint for Switzerland?
Most consumers are aware of the positive effect on greenhouse gas emissions by replacing animal through plant proteins. However, consumers as well as small local processors are often confronted with the fact that locally produced legume crops are not available, due to the lack of infrastructure as described above. This makes it impossible to serve the growing local demand for legumes with Swiss grown products, which are then imported from other countries.
Offering Swiss farms the ability to cultivate more legume crops and diversify their crop rotation, provides them the opportunity to reduce the amount of fertilizer that is needed. Legume crops are able to fix nitrogen and provide it to the crop of the following year, reducing the need of farmyard manure or synthetic fertilizers.
The provision of locally produced crops with short transportation routes, the reduction of livestock and the reduction of synthetic fertilizers will all have a positive impact on CO2 emissions of agriculture.
How do you define the positive impact of your solution on the problem described above?
• 5 other farms which are part of the Crop Cooperative Center until end of 2024
• 2 local processors which are part of the Cooperative and guarantee a purchase quantity of 15 tons per year
• Harvests of 10 tons of legume crops in year one
(which means a difference of 113t CO2 compared to the same amount of beef produced)
• Harvests of 30 tons legume crops in year two
(which means a difference of 339t CO2 compared to the same amount of beef produced)
