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AB Agri’s ambition is to create workplaces where every colleague can develop and succeed. Its action is focused on diversity and inclusion, safety and wellbeing and talent development.
A laboratory team leader at National Milk Records, Four Ashes, UK
AB Agri provides a variety of initiatives designed to enhance employees' knowledge, strengthen its talent pipeline, and support individual growth. It offers development and career progression opportunities to help individuals reach their full potential and positively contribute to business goals. Additionally, it seeks to nurture and maintain a fair, innovative and inclusive culture where people can bring their whole selves to work every day.
AB Agri manages health and safety through its Target Zero programme, which also covers feed safety, site environmental compliance and security. Alongside its commitment to safety, AB Agri seeks to provide healthy working environments and enhance all colleagues’ working lives.
AB Agri has a robust set of global standards that define clear expectations across all operations. These are set out in its Health and Safety Policy. A dedicated global group of HSE leads provides strategic oversight and ensures consistent implementation of protocols throughout the business globally. This governance structure enables effective monitoring of risk reduction initiatives and supports the delivery of AB Agri’s Health and Safety objectives.
In 2025, AB Agri continued to strengthen its Target Zero programme across its expanding global operations. Each business unit maintains a comprehensive continuous improvement roadmap focusing on three key pillars, risk reduction, training and competence development, and the reinforcement of a positive safety culture.
Leadership accountabilities remain central to AB Agri's approach, with responsibilities clearly defined at all management levels. Alongside this, in 2025, AB Agri continued to enhance its health, safety and wellbeing support structure by expanding the number of health and safety resources available within the businesses and increasing the number of operational managers with recognised health and safety management qualifications.
The Target Zero leadership training has been cascaded further across the business, with a focus on leading by example, involvement, communication, challenge, positive reinforcement and reward. AB Agri is also embracing technological innovation through a pilot programme involving an AI-powered camera system to leverage artificial intelligence to support the identification of potential hazards and create safer working environments.
In 2025, the number of employee on-site Lost Time Injuries (LTI) increased from 9 in 2024 to 16, resulting in an employee on-site LTI rate of 0.51%. One contractor also experienced an on-site LTI in 2025. All were low-severity incidents with full recovery. An analysis of these incidents identified higher risks with newer employees and during operational transitions. Targeted interventions have been implemented to address these factors.
The business is targeting incident reduction through a severity-focused approach, assessing all incidents, near misses and learning opportunities based on potential severity to prioritise proactive prevention measures. This approach provides valuable data to support risk reduction roadmaps and enables more accurate measurement of the business’s improvement journey towards zero harm. Training programmes demonstrated significant engagement with over 7,000 e-learning modules completed, while Safety Learning Opportunities reporting increased by over 26% across operations.
During 2025, AB Agri concluded legal proceedings that related to a serious workplace injury from 2021 at one of its UK sites, resulting in a prosecution. AB Agri accepted full responsibility and has implemented comprehensive measures to prevent recurrence. These actions included strengthening procedures, enhancing training on critical controls and establishing critical-to-life standards. AB Agri has also adopted such measures across all of its operations globally, and has intensified its focus on machinery safety through awareness campaigns and enhanced internal audit processes, ensuring all protocols align with its Target Zero commitment.
AB Agri operates the Take 2 approach as a core component of its Target Zero programme. This initiative empowers every individual to pause and reflect for two minutes before beginning any task, based on the principle that all incidents and injuries are preventable. By giving colleagues the authority and responsibility to assess potential risks and take appropriate action, Take 2 fosters a culture where health and safety is prioritised at every level.
In 2025, AB Agri held a World Health & Safety Day event during which all its operations globally paused to conduct comprehensive hazard identification walks. This initiative reinforced safety vigilance and collective responsibility, contributing to the culture of safety awareness.
AB Agri has strengthened its approach to risk assurance through targeted projects involving operational teams and data-driven insights. Additionally, over 200 people attended sessions on critical-to-life risk standards, enhancing awareness of high priority safety-critical activities across the business.
AB Agri is dedicated to providing a healthy working environment and improving the quality of working lives for all colleagues. It participates annually in World Wellbeing Week, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of keeping fit and well, inside and outside of work. In 2025, over 2,000 colleagues participated in events during the week from all over the globe which included walks, meditation, resilience talks and skills sharing.
In addition, a number of services are in place to help colleagues balance work and family commitments, manage stress and enjoy a healthier lifestyle. These include:
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employees | 7 | 11 | 13 | 9 | 16 |
| Employee rate | 0.29% | 0.42% | 0.50% | 0.28% | 0.51% |
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employees | 2622 | 2801 | 3052 | 3446 | 3380 |
| Percentage of Women | 30% | 32% | 34% | 36% | 36% |
AB Agri is committed to creating an inclusive workplace where all employees feel respected, valued and empowered to succeed. This culture is central to achieving equal opportunities and forms the foundation of our approach to employee attraction, engagement, development and retention. This commitment, under the umbrella of the ‘This is Me’ inclusion campaign, is supported by internal policies, targeted programmes, and inclusive leadership practices that collectively promote a diverse workforce. It aims to create a sense of belonging where everyone feels comfortable being themselves delivering inclusive processes and practices such as gender balanced leadership recruitment and flexible working policies.
AB Agri has established several employee network groups, such as PRIDE, Parents and Carers, Women at Work, Race and Ethnicity, Enable (Disability Inclusion) as well as support groups covering Menopause and Men as Carers. This year, a new “Fusion” group was launched to celebrate the richness of diverse cultures. Each group has a sponsor from the senior leadership team and the leads for each group meet monthly with the AB Agri Chief Executive and Group People and Performance Director to discuss challenges, advocate for underrepresented groups and seek support. In the past year, the groups saw an 18% growth in membership numbers and won an internal Centre of Excellence award for their work.
AB Agri focuses on attracting, developing and retaining a diverse workforce. Senior leaders embed DEI into business strategy and all have a mandatory inclusion measure in their objectives. Line managers are equipped with toolkits to promote diversity, lead inclusive conversations and provide support. This year, the division worked with a consultant to pilot a cultural audit aimed at identifying barriers to inclusion and informing a global roadmap for action.
These efforts have delivered tangible progress. Since 2022, formal flexible working arrangements to support improved work-life balance have increased by 141%, carers leave uptake has more than doubled, and shared parental leave participation rose by 57% in the past year. In 2024/25, 35% of its workforce is female, with women receiving 45% of all promotions this year – this is a rise of 2% on the previous year. The division has maintained a gender pay gap below 2% (0.4% in 2023/24) for the fourth year, and in 2025, AB Agri was listed in The Times Top 50 Employers for Gender Equality reflecting its commitment to gender parity.
In 2025, AB Agri also collaborated with the Armed Forces Careers Transition Service to reach military personnel transitioning to civilian careers, with STEM Women to engage female talent in science and engineering fields, and with Job Centre Plus to support individuals facing barriers to employment, including older workers and those with disabilities. It also partnered with the Business Disability Forum to develop an accessibility checklist to assess and improve site accessibility standards.
Recruitment outcomes have seen increased applications, interviews and offer acceptance rates among women, ethnic minorities and Individuals with disabilities. AB Agri prioritises fair and inclusive recruitment practices to ensure a diverse talent pool of candidates from a variety of sources, enabling the business to find the best candidate for each role. The division actively promotes gender balance when recruiting and selecting senior roles across all its businesses by encouraging a balanced shortlist of male and female candidates. It also uses CV anonymising practices to mitigate unconscious bias.
Globally, all recruitment agencies working with AB Agri are required to to sign an agreement confirming their adherence to the Group Supplier Code of Conduct. This agreement also references the AB Agri’s policies on Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Dignity at Work. AB Agri also joined the UK government’s apprenticeship levy transfer scheme. This scheme allows large employers to transfer unused apprenticeship levy funds to smaller businesses or organisations that do not pay the levy. This scheme aims to support local businesses in training apprentices. AB Agri has funded 12 agriculturally related apprenticeships to date.
Attracting talent to agriculture is an industry-wide challenge, with a need to compete for specialist skills in areas such as technology, marketing, engineering and data insights. In response, AB Agri has established four key focus areas aligned to its business strategy:
AB Agri offers a wide range of development initiatives to broaden employee knowledge and skill to drive internal career progression and cultivate a deeper talent pool. All senior leader successors are offered career conversations with their executive and people leads to identify individual support requirements and actions needed to be ready for promotion. In 2025, the business introduced the Shadow Board initiative to develop senior successors. This group worked together to develop solutions to a live business challenge. Of the 10 Shadow Board members eight are alumni of the internally-led high potential development programmes. Nearly half of all participants to these programmes since 2024 have been promoted since completing the programme and their new rotational programme to support talent progression in the ruminant business has been awarded with a Princess Royal Training award for exceptional commitment to learning and development.
A production operative at Premier Nutrition, Fradley, UK
In 2025, over 1,500 delegates participated in 135 development workshops. In addition to an offering of virtual and in-person workshops, they have over 40 different e-learning programmes available in five different languages to ensure everyone has an opportunity to learn and develop.
AB Agri offers levy-funded apprenticeships for employees who reside in England, giving colleagues the opportunity to study for a formal qualification and support their development and potential career progression.
Beyond internal skills development, AB Agri supports the next generation of food and farming talent. This includes sponsorship of the Nuffield Farming Scholarship programme, a 12-month placement for a Harper Adams University student, and funding for 11 PhD students by AB Vista, its feed additives technology business.
Keeping colleagues engaged is crucial for AB Agri who approach this in a number of different ways:
