Regenerative agriculture: a shared ambition for the future of farming?

Regenerative agriculture (RA) has captured the attention of major food companies – a term that encompasses various sustainable farming practices, some as ancient as agriculture itself. This study takes a supply chain perspective, exploring not how to "do" RA, but how it is being understood and how it can be propelled into the mainstream. The focus is on those in positions of power, such as large food companies and investors, aiming to create the conditions necessary for RA to succeed at scale.

The first section showcases different ways RA is perceived and its relevance in the broader sustainability landscape. The second section focuses on scaling up: how companies can create an environment where it is desirable for farmers to invest time and money in regenerative farming. The final section highlights themes often overlooked in RA, including social justice and equity, crop diversity, agroforestry, nutrition, and the debates over land use and livestock.

Five Key Insights About the Regenerative Agriculture Movement:

1. Collaborative efforts to set ambitious, shared goals for RA are valuable – as goals help to drive our behaviours and culture.
2. RA holds the potential to inspire profound, collective action, bolstering farm and supply chain resilience while aiding carbon drawdown and nature recovery. Substantial investments and a systems approach are required to avoid it becoming a lukewarm movement, progressing too slowly to effectively respond to climate risk.
3. Not everyone embraces RA; scepticism and concerns exist across different communities, making it an unsuitable framing for some farmers.
4. Companies championing RA are at varying stages of their journey, exhibiting disparate levels of ambition, resulting in a fragmented landscape.
5. Narrow perspectives of RA, focused on only a few practices, risk undermining more expansive regenerative ambitions, envisioned by many.

Seven Lessons For Companies Working to Scale Regenerative Agriculture:

1. While pilot projects are valuable, emphasis should now shift to mainstreaming RA through new business and financing models.
2. Projects must prioritise the needs of farmers, involve co-creation and engage with the nuances of change and risk – especially as initial costs can be high, with delayed returns.
3. Farmer support requires a triad of technical assistance, cultural acceptability, and financial incentives to de-risk the practice changes.
4. On-farm interactions between farmers and buyers are valuable to building trust and understanding; intermediaries can help facilitate this for larger companies.
5. Effective measurement is delicate and complex, with limited uniformity across companies despite efforts to align approaches. Certification programmes exist which can be valuable in fostering trust.
6. Many carbon offset schemes have integrity risks and a limited view of RA; they should not be relied upon or expected to help scale up RA practices.
7. Consumers should be engaged, but expecting buying habits to drive a RA revolution is complacent; value chains must help share any additional costs farmers incur.

In summary, the RA movement has huge potential as a transformative force in agriculture. While many are pursuing its ambitious goals, the journey is complex and should not be underestimated. It demands unlikely collaborations, big investments, new responsibilities, radical business models and creative, open mindsets.