This impact story is part of a series featuring India Landscape Accelerator (ILA) member companies and their efforts to scale Climate-Smart agriculture (CSA) in Indian landscapes. The series highlights existing company-led initiatives, lessons for implementation, and opportunities for ILA to accelerate collective action.
Through OCP Nutricrops, OCP is using its work on soil health and nutrient management to translate agronomic research into practical, locally relevant recommendations for farmers in India. Through its participation in the India Landscape Accelerator (ILA), the company is exploring how these efforts can be scaled through stronger partnerships, improved measurement systems and innovative financing models that support long-term agricultural resilience.
Restoring soils, strengthening resilience
OCP’s climate-smart agriculture (CSA) strategy in India is centered on building a stronger evidence base for soil health and smarter nutrient management, as well as translating that evidence into practical and tailored recommendations for farmers. The company focuses particularly on nutrient-deficient cropping systems and strategic value chains such as pulses, oilseeds and cereals, where more balanced nutrient use is vital for both agricultural productivity and long-term sustainability.
Its work is guided by four mutually reinforcing objectives that are needed to strengthen agricultural resilience over time: improving soil health, increasing farmer productivity and profitability, enhancing nutrient use efficiency, and reducing environmental impacts through CSA.
The company acknowledges that technical innovations alone are not sufficient to generate impact at scale. Nutrient imbalances remain widespread in Indian agriculture, with excessive reliance on nitrogen and inefficient use of phosphorus, potassium and micronutrients constraining productivity and environmental performance across many farming systems. The practical challenge is therefore to convert scientific evidence into recommendations that reflect local farming conditions and that demonstrate the agronomic and economic value of CSA to farmers.
Generating local evidence for smarter nutrient management
A key example of OCP’s approach in India is its collaborative agronomic trial program implemented with research partners including ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Insitute (IARI). The program reflects a broader challenge in sustainable agriculture: while fertilizer recommendations are often designed at regional or national levels, farmers operate within highly diverse soil, climate and cropping conditions. Hence, the initiative was established to evaluate improved phosphorus management solutions across different farming contexts, helping generate insights into how nutrient management practices can be adapted to local realities.
The research program comprises 12 trials per year throughout 2025 and 2026, implemented with ICAR-IARI at research stations in Pusa (New Delhi), Samastipur (Bihar), Indore (Madhya Pradesh), Dharwad (Karnataka), Junagadh (Gujarat) and Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh). The trials cover a wide range of crops, including maize, rice, soybean, wheat, chickpea and groundnut, spanning diverse agro-climatic conditions and nutrient-management approaches.
The program supports the company’s broader phosphorus stewardship agenda by promoting fertilizer application practices aligned with the principles of 4R Nutrient Stewardship: applying the right source of nutrients, at the right rate, at the right time and in the right place.
For farmers, these approaches could support more precise nutrient management by decoupling phosphorus and nitrogen applications to better match crop requirements, soil-test results and residual nutrient availability. Optimizing application rates, timing and placement could enhance nutrient uptake and crop performance while reducing fertilizer-related costs. If realized, these benefits could improve farm profitability and contribute to more balanced and sustainable soil fertility management over time.
While the trials are still ongoing, preliminary ICAR-IARI results indicate an average productivity gain of up to 19% compared with farmer practices and a cost benefit ratio improvement of 9%. As these findings are preliminary and context-specific, they will need further validation across crops, locations and seasons before broader generalization.
Scaling impact beyond the trial plot
For OCP, improving soil health at scale requires more than developing technically robust nutrient-management solutions. Field research must be translated into guidance that farmers can understand, trust and apply within their specific production contexts, and that takes into account local agronomic conditions and farm-level economic considerations.
Along with the research trials, OCP has conducted more than 329 farmer demonstrations to date during Rabi 2026, India’s winter cropping season, helping translate research insights into practical field-level learning. OCP’s efforts have highlighted several important opportunities for scaling, including the need for continued validation across geographies, greater farmer awareness and adoption, and stronger extension and advisory services.
Nonetheless, several barriers continue to constrain scale. These include limited access to locally relevant data, the difficulty of measuring outcomes consistently and cost-effectively, gaps in farmer-facing support, and insufficient financing to sustain implementation beyond individual trials.
Addressing these constraints requires collaboration across research institutions, public authorities, value chain actors, farmer-facing organizations and finance partners, with each contributing the capabilities needed to connect scientific evidence with implementation at scale. Supportive public policy and government-led extension systems are also essential to create enabling conditions for adoption, align incentives, strengthen farmer access to locally relevant advice and help successful approaches move from pilots to scale.
Scaling climate-smart agriculture requires cross-sector collaboration that extends beyond agronomy. Key opportunity areas include cost-effective measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) systems, farmer adoption, landscape-level data and outcome measurement, enabling public policies, and access to financing mechanisms that can sustain implementation at scale.
– Sara Hrar, Sustainability Project Manager at OCP
This is where ILA can support progress over time. Drawing on the foundations established through the India Landscape Accelerator Launchpad, the platform aims to help members identify complementarities across existing programs, strengthen the evidence needed for collective action and explore shared solutions to common scaling barriers.
Ultimately, OCP’s experience illustrates the importance of combining scientific evidence locally generated, farmer engagement and cross-sector collaboration to address the systemic barriers constraining scale, an approach that can benefit from collective platforms such as ILA to connect knowledge, partnerships and finance at the landscape level.
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