Agroalimentare Sud S.p.A. was founded in 1982 with the aim of bringing the transformation of malting barley into malt directly into an area devoted to agricultural production so as to reduce the costs and transport time with considerable benefits also for the quality of the product.
Since 2014, Agroalimentare Sud is a member of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform (SAI Platform), the leading non-profit organization for the agri-food industries, which promotes and supports the development of sustainable agriculture worldwide.
To achieve the goal to produce 100% of malt using malting barley from sustainable agriculture, Agroalimentare Sud decided to share and adopt the same concepts of the SAI (Sustainable Agriculture Initiative) Platform.
Sustainability is often described as a balance between the three P: People, Planet and Profit.
According to SAI Platform definition “Sustainable agriculture is the efficient production of safe, high quality agricultural products, in a way that protects and improves the natural environment, the social and economic conditions of farmers, their employees and local communities, and safeguards the health and welfare of all farmed species”.
The EU itself distorts the system of agricultural aid. The new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2014/2020 is much more focused and pushing more and more towards sustainable agriculture by giving significant weight to the concept of "greening" (inseparable combination of productivity and sustainability).
In order to put in practice the concepts of sustainability, Agroalimentare Sud has funded the development of its own CoP (Code of Practice) essentially composed of two pillars:
1) orzobirra.net covering all technical aspects allowing to provide the farmer the necessary assistance to optimize operations by systematically applying the best agricultural practices and achieve sustainable production of its arable land.
Agroalimentare Sud has identified the mass balance approach for the measurement of the sustainable raw material volumes. This entails that the input materials into a process must be equal to the output materials, therefore, taking into account the losses inherent to the transformation process (malting), the principle is also valid for the malt produced.
This system has been chosen because it is accepted and shared by all stakeholders.
Below an overview is given: