Reports and Figures

KWS Sustainability Reports

As a plant breeding company, KWS is part of the agricultural value chain. We mainly require heat for drying seed, and cold and heat for breeding work in greenhouses or climatic chambers, and for operating agricultural machinery. We currently cover these energy requirements predominantly with natural gas, by purchasing electricity from national power grids, and with diesel, but also by using energy obtained from biomass (biomethane, wood chips and corn cobs). The company also has its own photovoltaic systems at various locations and they help reduce the amount of energy that has to be purchased externally. Our global energy requirements totaled 777 (851) terajoules (TJ) ¹ in calendar year 2023, of which 13% (15%) was covered by renewable energies ². The decrease in energy requirements was caused by lower consumption of natural gas, as well as a decline in combustion of corn cobs and purchased electricity. The energy intensity was 0.46 (0.57 ³) gigajoules (GJ) per €1,000 of net sales.

KWS has set itself the goal of reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 50% by 2030 compared with the baseline year 2020/2021 (47,587 ⁴ tons of CO2e). KWS therefore surpasses the 42% reduction required by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) for this period. Our aim is to reduce our emissions to net zero in 2050. Both objectives are geared toward meeting the 1.5 degree target defined in the Paris Agreement. In this section, we comment on the changes in energy and emissions excluding our locations in South America that were being sold as of June 30, 2024. We present a reconciliation table disclosing energy and emissions before the sale of the South American locations.

¹ We use the relevant physical conversion variables to calculate energy consumption. In the year under review, we changed our energy accounting and now disclose our energy consumption before energy losses from gasoline and diesel engines.

² This includes energy obtained from the combustion of biomethane, corn cobs and wood chips and from in-house power generation. We do not have any information to enable the data on electricity we buy in to be broken down by renewable energies.

³ The previous year’s figure is 0.57 GJ per €1,000 of net sales both including and excluding the locations affected by the sale.

⁴ Baseline year excluding the South American locations that are to be sold (before their sale: 56,463 tons of CO2e)