brands in scaling regenerative agriculture

THE ROLE OF BRANDS IN SCALING REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

YORKSHIRE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY AND NATIONAL TRUST

ALASTAIR TRICKETT 2020 NUFFIELD SCHOLAR

In 2019, regenerative farming was a fringe movement. Two years later I was reading about it on the side of a breakfast cereal packet. That is because corporates are rapidly realising that farmers hold the solutions to some of their biggest board-room issues. As a result, they are increasingly engaging in how the land that produces their raw ingredients and materials is managed.

But whilst the supply chain’s intent to source from regenerative farms is clear (and we hope sincere), making it happen is far from simple. That’s because success or failure hinges on influencing a farmer’s decision making on the ground; and right now, farmers are under immense strain. Recent global events have only re-enforced the structural issues that define the high-risk low-profit business models in agriculture, putting farmers even more on the back foot. Therefore, they treat supply chain intervention with scepticism and caution. This report explores how these two parties can be brought together to solve each other’s problems. How corporate commitments to regenerative agriculture can bring about meaningful change on farms. My conclusions are relevant to any organisation who aspires to source from, enable or report on regenerative farming in their value chain. It has lessons to guide corporates, investors and institutional landowners in leveraging their influence to have genuine impact at scale.

My research included visiting organisations and farms across

California, Australia, and the UK. I learned lessons first-hand from trying regenerative approaches on our own farm. And I learned from amongst the 1,000 members of Future Farmers, an organisation I chaired until 2022.

Shortly after starting my research I co-founded a business, Grassroots Farming, as an opportunity to implement and test my findings. This has resulted in a new regenerative beef supply chain working directly with farmers as change agents to service over fifty restaurants in and around London. These are the main conclusions of my report: 1. To successfully enable regenerative agriculture within their value chains, corporates must solve problems for farmers on the ground. 2. Corporates must get comfortable with a version of regenerative agriculture that empowers farmers to make their own on-farm decisions, whilst meeting the corporate’s reporting objectives. 3. To embed long-term outcomes, corporates must address the stark imbalance of risk and value that exists between them and farmers. Corporate interest in agriculture should be welcomed by farmers. If used for good, it could leverage a system-wide transition in how land is managed at scale. But it is also fraught with risks even for the well intentioned; the biggest being that it increases extractive demands on farmers, re-enforcing the degenerative cycles that led corporates to regenerative agriculture in the first place. Not to mention ‘greenwashing’ and disillusionment. Bringing about meaningful change is not as easy as making statements on the side of cereal packets. But change is happening. Change must happen. The challenge now, is how to make it happen right.