Summary: In promotion of their sustainability program FarmAhead Incentive, Arla shows idyllic visuals of small scale farmers and grazing cows. But FarmAhead is the exact opposite: instead, it rewards factory farming!
The program, which claims to reward Arla’s farmer members' efforts to reduce their climate footprint, supports the biggest and most industrialized farms. These farms are both more detached from the local ecosystem as well as far higher emitters than the small scale farmers that graze their cows on grass, like those pictures in Arla’s promotion. Meanwhile, the company has actively taken a stand to end a law, unique only to Sweden, that gives cows the legal right to graze outdoors in the summer.
FarmAheadTM Incentive was formerly known as the “Arla Sustainability Incentive” with its heavily promoted Climate Check data tool as the basis for the rewards scheme. Some experts speculate that the change from “Sustainability Incentive” to simply–“Incentive”-- stems from the potential approval of the EU Green Claims Legislation in 2025. The law aims to prevent greenwashing by setting stricter standards for corporations on their environmental claims – such as the use of the term “sustainability” . This is something Arla’s program is very unlikely to achieve, but this doesn’t stop Arla from claiming it to be a “sustainability-rewarding system” where the company rewards the individual farmer according to the company’s point system.
In this system, farmers score only a few points for their biodiversity enhancing practices and for sustainable grazing on perennial crops . In contrast, “feed efficiency” and other intensification-focused measures give more than half of the total possible points that can be earned. Yet, Arla’s advertising showcases practices that are barely rewarded and hides what the program is really about - environmentally damaging, high-intensity farming.
Arla is known for its ads in which the narrator says that sustainable grazing is “done in perennial fields, rich in biodiversity thanks to the grazing”. The company also often highlights the same phrase when they address the Swedish public. But real sustainability - that which restores ecosystems and increases biodiversity - is actually disincentivised in its reward system given the much higher value given to intensification.
“In FarmAhead, high yields are rewarded and all types of [sustainable] land use are seen as negative, i.e. they score less points. This means that extensive natural grazing, which creates open landscapes, is the best thing you can do for biodiversity on farmlands in Sweden, barely scores any points. But keeping cows indoors and growing maize, which requires a lot of pesticides but gives high yields, scores high.
Arla says FarmAhead is a sustainability initiative, but it pushes farmers towards intensifying [their production]. Arla has no interest in smaller farms, it's just an inconvenience to source milk from many smaller farms rather than a few large ones. Therefore, intensification and expansion are rewarded in every possible way.”
Anonymous Arla farmer, interviewed by Greenpeace in 2024 for the report Dairytales
