HAVE PITY FOR REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE FOR INADVERTENTLY FIGHTING A TWO-FRONT WAR By Walt Duflock, Senior Vice President, Innovation
Regenerative agriculture is heralded by many as the savior of global agriculture. If farmers can adopt regenerative practices like cover cropping, no-till, diverse crop rotations and managed rotational grazing, their soil health would improve and farmers could improve their ag operation’s productivity while fighting climate change. Who could say no to that? And yet, with the promised panaceas of better farms and less climate change, only about 12 percent of all U.S. farmland incorporates at least one widely accepted regenerative practice. Far fewer have chosen to stack regenerative practices together to increase the aggregate impact of regenerative ag. Why? It turns out that once you get past bumper sticker slogans, it’s fairly complex to implement regenerative ag practices, and every practice change adds costs to a farmer’s operation. So having gone through some pretty rough patches over the past five years, farmers don’t have a lot of margin left to spend on new practices, no matter how good the alleged benefits. When they consider practice changes, they generally end up with two options to cover the cost-consumers paying premium price at retail or practice payments from companies that have made ESG commitments. To date, consumers have shown little interest in paying a premium for regeneratively grown products, particularly in specialty crops. At the same time, recent studies have found only eight percent of companies have made ESG commitments put any actual funds behind the commitments, which makes you wonder how they expect the funding to occur. That combination puts farmers who want to make changes in a difficult position. This is why regenerative ag finds itself in the middle of a two-front war. The first is the consumer front, where it competes with organic products. Organics have grown to over $228 billion in global sales in 2024 and are forecast to reach $658 billion in sales by 2034 (11 percent annual growth rate). Organics have had nice growth over the last couple of decades even though the definition has not always been clear, consumers have been often confused, and the enforcement of organic labeling was inconsistent and far from perfect. All that said, it is one of the few words that ring the register with consumers, and it has been doing so for decades. Unlike organic, regenerative does not walk into
a blank slate; it has to compete with the $228 billion organic revenue juggernaut. To continue fighting this battle successfully, regenerative agriculture will need to spend large chunks of marketing budgets for years (likely decades) to establish itself as a new player with brand awareness in a crowded landscape (Organic! Locally grown! Hormone-free! Climate-smart! What’s a consumer to do?) It seems like a battle best avoided. What about the second front? Growers implementing regenerative practices can go to companies with ESG commitments and work with them to secure payments. In exchange, the buyers of the practice change often get things like carbon credits. However, the tools are nascent, not perfect and not infallible at measuring and tracking carbon. Even worse, in many cases if the carbon cannot be found, it’s not very good at identifying the root cause (pun intended) of the missing carbon. And here is the big problem: If a carbon audit is performed years later and the carbon is missing, guess who is almost always left on the hook to write a check and give back the carbon credit cash? Yep, you guessed it, the farmer who sold the credit to the ESG buyer. That is the big challenge for regenerative agriculture, which wants to be widely adopted but does not yet have the support of many consumers who will pay more or of the ESG committed companies that often do not want to pay at all. Neither front of this battle is particularly attractive. Consumers are facing years of significant inflation, and their grocery budget doesn’t fill up as much of the shopping cart as it used to. ESG commitments are being questioned for multiple reasons, and that does not make their willingness to bring funding for practice changes any more likely. The best path forward for regenerative agriculture is to support growers with education, proven practices and local help to make changes easier and more cost- effective. This avoids both fronts mentioned above and creates a slower growth path for regenerative ag. On the plus side, this does two things to improve sustainability; it improves the sustainability of ag operations while improving the sustainability of their finances. That may be the best win-win for regenerative ag currently available.
13 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com May | June 2025
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