The role of corporate supply chains in scaling regenerative agriculture. A farmer perspective.

The cost of food is below the real cost of production. Due to the efficiency and scale of modern food systems, most farmers produce commodities and have relied on the unconscious drawing down of natural capital to remain profitable – mainly soil carbon which has degraded soil health.

Due to low profitability, farmers are locked into a growth and under-investment paradigm; soil health, the basis for long-term profit and resilience to extreme weather events, has been eroded. This forces the farmer to channel any available investment into short-term profit drivers with a known and immediate return, namely artificial fertilisers, agrochemicals and tillage. However, these themselves further propagate the insipid erosion of soil health and biodiversity, the foundations for long-term profit and resilience. The decline of natural capital continues, and the most important assets underpinning a farm’s profit and resilience are under-invested and unable to recover.

Breaking out of a low-profit, low-investment cycle on farms and affecting a systems change to regenerative agriculture is very hard. It requires an acknowledgment of the hidden costs and damage done in the current farm management approach. It requires accepting and learning an alternative approach along with investment in new machines and infrastructure. And it requires a leap of faith because the time taken for the underlying systems of fertility to recover and support plant and animal growth are unknown and different on each farm.

Fortunately, corporates are interested in supporting farmers to transition to regenerative systems to achieve their own overarching sustainability objectives, particularly driven by brand communications, procurement risk and regulatory compliance considerations resulting from climate change.

However, current efforts from corporates to support farmers underestimate the scale and nature of the challenge. They take a pilot and project approach characterised by top-down interventions of singular management changes, devised by consultants. This is how professionals have been trained in project management; however, it isn’t fit for a challenge of this scale and pace, nor does it give credit to the new technologies available to make interventions both more meaningful and cost-affective. Most importantly it misses the enormous challenge of changing a farmer’s mindset, and accounting for the fact each farm operates in its own unique environmental and management context.  

They also get tied up investing in infrastructure that enables the segregation of ingredients from farm to fork as a pre-requisite to sustainability without considering the alternatives. This assumption, that segregation must precede sustainability overlooks some of the most successful initiatives bringing about sustainable market transformation. They could benefit from studying the successes of Better Cotton, fairtrade or renewable electricity which all have the concept of mass balance at their core.

Precompetitive collaboration between corporates would enable targeted bottom-up change on farm. The recognition that farms supply multiple customers with overlapping needs presents the opportunity to pool resources, get more support to farmers and ease the overall burden of change.

Shared investment in platform technology would unlock the asymmetry between data held on farm and budgets held by corporates. I consider this to be the best vector for achieving a farmer-driven system change, financially supported by the corporates whist meeting quantified reporting requirements.