Fossil fuel whack-a-mole

In the 1990s, Tom's of Maine decided to reformulate its deodorant. One ingredient, Propylene glycol, is synthesized from natural gas, and Tom's wanted a product free of all ingredients derived from fossil fuels. NPR's Morning Edition:

One of the reasons shampoo and toothpaste and deodorant have ingredients derived from fossil fuels is that those ingredients are really cheap and abundant because oil and natural gas are cheap and abundant. Tom's could've used the replacement, but that would have made the deodorant really, really expensive for customers.

[Tom's of Maine chemist Pam Scheeler said,] "The cost would be so prohibitive that the product that you would be able to offer that uses that one very expensive ingredient, would price it out of the market."

It took Tom's nearly 20 years to finally find a supplier that could make a plant-derived propylene glycol to scale and cheaply enough.

But: growing plants consumes fossil fuel, sometimes a lot. Manufacturing fertilizers, operating sowing and harvesting equipment, processing the plants to make the chemical, delivering the chemical to Tom's plant -- all these activities consume fossil fuel. In eliminating traditional propylene glycol, did Tom's actually increase the amount of fossil fuel used to make its deodorant?