Bayer Promised to Reach 100 Million Smallholder Farmers. Three Years On, the Number Has Barely Moved.

Every large company now publishes a sustainability report, and every one of them wants to be judged on its ambitions. Bayer, to its credit, invites exactly that. “You should hold us to that ambition,” writes chief executive Bill Anderson — who also holds the title of Chief Sustainability Officer — in the opening pages of the company’s Impact Report 2025. It is an unusually direct invitation, and this article takes it at face value. Because when you set the marketing language aside and follow the numbers through the report, the story of Bayer’s regenerative agriculture programme is not the smooth upward curve the framing implies. It is a promise that has, on its central metric, stalled.

The promise itself is bold and genuinely important. Bayer estimates that there are around 550 million smallholder farmers worldwide, and describes them as “the backbone of food security in many rural regions of the world.” These are farmers working plots of less than ten hectares, largely in low- and middle-income countries. The report is candid about the bind they are in: yields are often low because of limited access to quality seed and agronomic knowledge, financing is scarce, market access is poor, and — increasingly — they are on the front line of a changing climate, exposed to more frequent harvest losses. Against that backdrop, Bayer has committed to “support a total of 100 million smallholder farmers in LMICs by 2030” through better access to its products, services and partnerships. It is the agricultural half of the company’s “Health for all, Hunger for none” mission, and it maps directly onto the Sustainable Development Goals for Zero Hunger and No Poverty.

This deep dive links three Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) is the primary goal, as Bayer's 100-million smallholder-farmer target sits at the heart of its "Hunger for none" mission and its bid to strengthen food security for the world's ~550 million smallholders. SDG 1 (No Poverty) follows directly, since raising smallholder yields, incomes and market access is how that farmer support translates into lifting rural families out of poverty. SDG 13 (Climate Action) completes the set through Bayer's regenerative-agriculture levers — reduced tillage, cover crops and its 30%-by-2030 on-field emissions target — which aim to cut farming's greenhouse gas footprint while helping farmers withstand a changing climate.

So how is it going? Here is where the report rewards a careful reader. The trajectory Bayer discloses runs as follows: 42 million farmers in the 2019 base year, rising to 45 million in 2020, 49 million in 2021, and 52 million in 2022. Then the momentum evaporates. The figure reached 53 million in 2023, slipped back to 52 million in 2024, and recovered to 53 million in 2025. In other words, across the three most recent reporting years the number has moved between 52 and 53 million and effectively gone nowhere. Bayer reports the 2025 result as an increase of “one million compared with the previous year” — technically true, but a one-million-farmer gain on a base of 52 million, in the fifth year of a ten-year sprint, is not the pace of a company on track to reach 100 million by 2030.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. To hit its target, Bayer would need to add roughly 47 million more farmers in five years — nearly doubling its current reach — after adding just 11 million in the previous six. The report does not present this gap as a problem to be explained; it presents 53 million as steady progress. That is precisely the kind of framing an accountability-minded reader should push back on.

To its credit, Bayer does not hide the reasons behind the plateau, even if it does not dwell on them. The 2025 uptick, the report explains, reflected “the strong performance of our non-commercial partnership projects in Africa,” while reach from “our commercial business in Asia/Pacific remained constrained by market- and weather-related factors.” That single sentence contains an important admission. The growth that Bayer can point to is coming disproportionately from philanthropically funded partnership programmes rather than from its core commercial business selling seeds and crop-protection products to farmers. The regional breakdown reinforces the point: of the 53 million farmers reached in 2025, around 35 million were in Asia/Pacific, roughly 16 million in Africa and the Middle East, and only about 2 million in Latin America. The commercial engine, in other words, is sputtering in exactly the region Bayer identifies as strategically central, and the target is being propped up by the partnership work.

Bayer's 2030 agriculture scorecard, drawn from its Impact Report 2025. The flagship commitment — supporting 100 million smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries — sits at 53 million in 2025, just 53% of the way there and effectively flat since 2023, despite the target being tied to Board long-term pay. Alongside it run three regenerative-agriculture targets for 2030: a 30% cut in farming customers' on-field greenhouse gas emissions per unit of crop, a 30% reduction in the environmental footprint of Bayer's crop-protection portfolio per hectare, and a 25% gain in smallholder water productivity. Together they show a company with precise, measurable climate and resource goals — and one headline number that isn't moving fast enough to be met.

Those partnerships are worth examining on their own terms, because they are where much of the genuine on-the-ground impact appears to sit — and because they raise the question of how much of this is Bayer and how much is other people’s money. The flagship initiative, Better Life Farming, is a coalition of Bayer, the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), the irrigation firm Netafim, the fertiliser company Yara and some 35 local public and private partners and NGOs. It runs a network of “last-mile” centres that bring inputs, agronomic advice, financing and market access to remote rural areas, and Bayer reports expanding that network to more than 4,000 centres across India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Honduras, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast in 2025. Separately, the Bayer Foundation — with funding from the Gates Foundation and the German development agency GIZ — backed the Digital Farmer II programme run by Mercy Corps AgriFin, which the report says reached 5.4 million smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2025, 42% of them women. And through the Pula Foundation’s “10 million Resilient Farmer Initiative,” Bayer’s Crop Science division is helping fund an effort to insure smallholders against climate risk, reaching around 750,000 farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria in 2025 on the way to a 2030 goal of ten million.

These are substantial programmes, and the report deserves credit for one thing that many corporate sustainability documents lack: independent verification. Bayer commissioned the social-impact measurement company 60 Decibels to survey participants in three smallholder projects in India, Kenya and Mexico/Honduras between 2022 and 2024. Across those longitudinal surveys, somewhere between roughly 60% and 95% of participants said the programmes had raised their yields and farm income and improved both their way of farming and their quality of life. For its FarmRise digital-advisory app — which reached around 130,000 active smallholder users in India in 2025 before expanding to the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya — independent 2025 research found that 73% of farmers said the app had improved their farming and 79% reported greater confidence in investing in their farms. Third-party measurement of this kind is the single most credible thing in this section of the report, and it should be recognised as such. It is also, tellingly, applied to the partnership programmes rather than to the headline 53-million figure, whose methodology Bayer describes only in broad terms and partly on its website.

That headline figure carries unusual weight for another reason: it is not just a reputational target but a financial one. Bayer discloses that the 100-million smallholder goal, along with its other “100 million” commitments, is “accounted for in the long-term variable compensation” of its Board of Management and senior managers. When a target is wired into executive pay, its definition and measurement become questions of governance, not just marketing. A metric that has hovered at 52 to 53 million for three years while remaining tied to leadership incentives invites the obvious question of how demanding the underlying measurement really is — and whether “support” is being defined generously enough to keep the number from falling.

The regenerative-agriculture story does not end with farmer headcount. Bayer frames its whole agricultural sustainability effort around a specific definition of regenerative agriculture: an “outcome-driven cropping system” built on two objectives — helping farmers maintain or increase yields while using fewer inputs, and “regeneration” that has a positive impact on nature through improved soil health, biodiversity, water conservation, lower field-level greenhouse gas emissions and greater carbon sequestration. It is a deliberately outcome-based framing, and it is more rigorous than the vague “regenerative” branding that has become common across the food industry. The practical levers Bayer names are familiar and evidence-backed: reduced or no tillage and the sowing of cover crops, both of which help capture carbon dioxide in the soil.

But here too the accountability lens finds something worth flagging. Bayer’s on-field climate target is to enable its farming customers to cut their greenhouse gas emissions “per mass unit of crop produced by 30% by 2030,” measured across 17 crop-country combinations against individually defined base years drawn from the 2021 or 2022 harvests. Buried in the same passage is a disclosure that deserves more attention than it gets: “Base years were adjusted in 2024 due to additional data requirements based on an updated GHG calculator within the GHG reporting methodology and lack of data availability from prior years.” Adjusting a baseline is sometimes legitimate and sometimes necessary when methodologies improve. But moving the starting line partway through a target period is exactly the sort of change that can quietly make a goal easier to hit, and it is the kind of detail that external assurance and clear year-on-year disclosure exist to keep honest. The report notes that some crop-country pairings — Italy-Corn and Spain-Corn — were included specifically “because data were already available,” another reminder that what gets measured here is shaped as much by data convenience as by where emissions are highest.

Bayer’s other agricultural targets follow the same pattern of specificity: a 30% reduction in the treated-area-weighted environmental impact per hectare of its crop-protection portfolio by 2030 against a 2014–2018 baseline, delivered partly through its “CropKey” molecule-design approach; and a 25% improvement in water productivity for its smallholder rice customers by 2030 against a 2019–2021 baseline, driven by its DirectAcres initiative to shift farmers from transplanted, flooded rice to mechanised direct-seeded rice. Rice is a shrewd place to focus, given its outsized methane footprint, and direct-seeded systems have a real evidence base behind them. These are the kinds of targeted, technically literate commitments that distinguish a serious operator from a greenwasher — provided the results are eventually disclosed against those baselines with the same clarity.

One further detail cuts in Bayer’s favour and deserves acknowledgement in any fair accounting. The company states that it “does not plan to assert its intellectual property rights against smallholder farmers who save seeds on their farms for private and non-commercial use,” specifically to avoid pushing them into extreme poverty. For a company whose commercial model rests heavily on proprietary seed and trait technology, that is a meaningful concession, and it addresses one of the longest-running criticisms levelled at large agribusiness in the developing world.

So what does an honest reading of the Impact Report 2025 conclude about Bayer’s regenerative agriculture work? Not that it is hollow. The partnerships are real, the third-party verification is more than most peers offer, the technical targets are precise rather than aspirational fog, and the seed-saving commitment has teeth. But the central promise — 100 million smallholder farmers by 2030 — is behind schedule in a way the report’s framing works hard to soften. Reach has been flat for three years, the growth that exists leans on donor-funded partnerships rather than commercial expansion, the metric that anchors executive pay has barely moved, and at least one climate baseline has been quietly adjusted mid-course. Bill Anderson asked to be held to Bayer’s ambition. Held to it, the picture is of a company doing genuine and often admirable work at the field level while its flagship number tells a story of stalled momentum that five years of accelerating effort will be needed to rescue. That is worth watching — and worth measuring, year by year, against exactly the baselines Bayer has set for itself.

Why It Matters

Corporate sustainability reports are written to be admired, not audited. That is why the numbers matter more than the narrative. A pharmaceutical and agricultural giant like Bayer can point to thousands of last-mile centres and millions of farmers reached, and every one of those claims may be true — but a flagship target that has sat at 53 million for three years, while tied to executive pay, is the difference between real impact and reputation management. Holding companies to account does not mean assuming bad faith. It means reading past the framing, checking the trajectory against the target, noticing when a baseline gets moved, and asking whether growth is coming from the core business or from other people’s philanthropy. Bayer invited that scrutiny in its own CEO’s words. The least we can do is take the invitation seriously — because the farmers, the climate and the mission all depend on the promises being kept, not just published.