Country Crock, America’s iconic buttery spread, depends on healthy soybeans for its ingredients. But the soil these plants are grown in is in desperate need of revitalizing. America’s farmlands are on life support due to planting and harvesting the same crops over and over again. This bare, broken soil causes erosion, nutrient depletion, pest damage and greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, there is a very sustainable solution… cover crops. Cover crops are planted in between harvested crops. Their roots cover the ground all winter, keeping the soil and nutrients in place, yielding healthier plants the next harvest.

Still, many farmers have yet to adopt cover crops due to lack of understanding and being stuck in their old ways. To change this, Country Crock launched The Cover Crops Project to provide financial resources and training to farmers. But we needed a unique way to get their attention.

We created a way for farmers to learn about cover crops while actually sipping them.

Farmers love whiskey. Whiskey is made from rye. The most common cover crop is cereal rye. So Country Crock partnered with a distillery to craft a one-of-a-kind whiskey. Made with some of the actual rye from cover crops. The very same rye that is saving America’s farmlands.

By making a whiskey out of cover crops, our strategy was to engage with our primary audience –farmers – in a way they would find hard to ignore. Cover crops are currently grown by only 12% of American farmers. So helping more farmers understand how cover crops work and leading them to enroll in The Cover Crops Project for actual training on how to plant them was our goal.

But our secondary audience was the general public. Ask anyone in a city what a cover crop is and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Not a lot of city folks talk about cover crops, but they do enjoy talking about whiskey. And the more people we can get talking about the sustainability benefits of cover crops, the more public support farmers will have in growing them.

By definition, a cover crop is not harvested. It simply covers the ground and protects the soil.

So for the first time, we gave cover crops another use. In July of 2021, several acres of cover crops were harvested by a Kansas City area farmer near the same fields that Country Crock grows its soybeans. The cover crop cereal rye was then cleaned, bagged and taken to a distillery.

This limited batch Cover Crop Rye Whiskey was blended and bottled by J. Rieger & Co. – a Kansas City based distillery that specializes in rye whiskey. The result was a buttery smooth whiskey available for purchase by farmers all across the country on mashandgrape.com. It officially launched on February 14, 2022 on Facebook and Instagram. Every glass raised is raising awareness for The Cover Crops Project, which teaches more farmers how to plant them.

Most farmers are aware of cover crops, yet only 12% have adopted them. The goal of Cover Crop Whiskey was to engage with farmers in a way they couldn’t ignore, and raise awareness for The Cover Crops Project – ultimately getting more farmers to plant them.

Since its launch, we’ve reached 1.5 million people in farmland communities.

As a result, we’ve planted nearly 15 billion new cover crops.

And we’ve revitalized 9 billion pounds of soil across 4,500 acres.

Our Cover Crop Whiskey has been written about in key agricultural trade publications such as FarmProgress, No Till Farmer and Farm Talk… all the way to Forbes Magazine. It’s also been covered by the spirits industry with features in Food & Wine, Bevnet and VinePair. And to top it off, we have a 5-star rating from Mash and Grape, the online spirits retailer which

sells our Whiskey.