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One June day in 2014, Beth Robertson-Martin
found herself standing on a dirt road dividing
two California tomato fields. On one side sat a
farm that was nothing more than a 300-acre
carpet of dried-out dirt. “It looked like a scene
from Mad Max,” she remembers. “Everything
was dead.” On the other side was a 6-foot-tall
hedgerow, a tangle of white-blossomed milk-
weed, sunflowers and elderberry bushes that
General Mills had planted alongside the toma-
toes to create a habitat for bees, butterflies and
other pollinators. “That was the moment I knew
this was what I was meant to do for the rest of
my life,” says Robertson-Martin, who works with
farmers and other suppliers to source organic,
sustainable ingredients for GM’s brands, includ-
ing Cascadian Farm, Muir Glen and Lärabar. “It
wasn’t just the vast field of tomatoes and that
the flowers were blooming and gorgeous. I
could hear the difference—the birds, the bees.”
It’s more than a little ironic, because when
Robertson-Martin was a kid, she was terrified
of insects—bees in particular. But the startling
decline of honeybees and wild pollinators
like bumblebees was a top concern when she
joined the company seven years ago. That
year, U.S. beekeepers lost 45 percent of their
hives. And the more she studied the problem,
the clearer it became that helping pollinators—
which are necessary to grow more than 35 per-
cent of all food crops, and about a third of the
ingredients for the products GM sells—would
require a bold commitment. As Robertson-Mar-
tin explains, “A robust insect population is the
clearest indicator of a healthy habitat. If you
have bugs, it means you have a lot of biodi-
versity—which means you have great soil. And
healthy soil helps to sequester carbon from the
atmosphere, prevent erosion, increase water
retention and nutrients for crops and offer a
better environment for wildlife.”
Her passion, approachability and disarminghonesty are key traits that have made her such
a successful advocate. On her watch, General
Mills has invested more than $6 million to cre-
ate and restore pollinator habitats on 73,000
acres of its suppliers’ farms. She also helped
spearhead a partnership with the Xerces Soci-
ety and the University of Minnesota Bee Lab to
contribute a total of $4 million to help farmers
plant another 100,000 acres of bee-friendly
habitat across the country by 2021. These ini-
tiatives make the Minneapolis- based company
the biggest contributor to pollinator health in
the U.S. Additionally, GM has committed to
sustainably source 100 percent of its top 10
ingredients (including palm oil, corn, oats and
cocoa) by 2020, through various practices from
reducing greenhouse gas emissions on farms to
water conservation. And this spring, the com-
pany announced a program to promote regen-
erative agriculture practices—environmentally
minded methods of farming that help create
healthy soil—on 1 million acres of land by 2030.
The bees are buzzing with thanks.Championing PollinatorsBeth Robertson-Martin
Director of Commodities and
Pollinator Council Lead, General Mills