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Olivia B

May 9, 2025

min read

Regenerative Agriculture: Three Expert Perspectives

At the Collective's May event, three panelists discussed how regenerative agriculture can drive value for farmers, businesses, and communities.

Our soil is in a critical state. Conventional agricultural practices are decimating the lifegiving properties of soil around the globe, releasing additional carbon into the atmosphere and rendering croplands infertile. Already a third of our planet’s soil is degraded, and UNESCO predicts that the number could be as high as 90% by 2050. Nowhere is immune — agricultural systems from giant operations in the Midwest to subsistence farms in rural Malawi are affected by soil degradation.

Regenerative agriculture offers a way forward, using sustainable land management practices to not only avoid doing more harm, but also to restore already degraded soil. At our fourth community networking event, we welcomed three expert panelists to share their perspectives on this pressing agricultural issue: Melissa Spear, Executive Director at Tilth Alliance; Paul Shoemaker, CEO of Carnation Farms; and Richard Moe, Principal Technical Program Manager at Opportunity International’s Digital Innovation Group.

The Global Impact Collective brought together a diverse group of professionals from farmers to agronomists to professors to discuss this important subject. The topics ranged from the adoption to the economics and future of regenerative agriculture. A few key themes emerged:

Challenges

Establishing Standards of Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative agriculture is widely defined as farming practices that are minimally disruptive to the soil, exercise crop diversity, utilize cover crops in the off season, and maintain living roots. However, unlike the rigorous criteria built around organic certification, we don’t yet have universally accepted standards and certifications for what it means to claim a company practices regenerative agriculture. If businesses and governments wish to certify and systematize regenerative farming, and if they want consumers to trust the certification, they will need hardier definitions.

Greenwashing: “Because it doesn’t have a definition, because there is no legal standard, regenerative agriculture is subject to greenwashing,” Melissa said. She pointed out that many large corporate food companies implement a no-till policy and label themselves regenerative despite still using pesticides and herbicides. “We have to figure out how to clarify and protect the integrity of what it is that we’re calling regenerative.”
“Organic Plus”: Despite the term generally gaining traction, an average consumer will not have a clear idea of what regenerative agriculture means when the label appears on a food item. Paul suggested pitching the concept to consumers as “organic plus,” signifying that regenerative food has all the same qualifications of organic food plus the benefit of reinvigorating the soil.

Entrenched Political Systems

A long history of political incentives has led the United States to favor large, corporate, conventional farms, often at the expense of smaller ones. Changing this existing bureaucracy is slow and arduous, but it can be done. Europe, for instance, is 10-15% organic, compared to only 1-2% in the US.

Historical precedent: Paul identified three moments in American farming that led to our current agricultural system:
- At the end of World War II, pesticides and herbicides were commercialized on a broad scale.
- Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, promoted a “get big or get out” approach to farming and urged farmers to plant commodity monocrops like corn “from fencerow to fencerow.”
- The focus on ethanol created a strong orientation towards conventional agriculture.
Lack of subsidies and financial support: The 2018 Farm Bill allocated $428 billion dollars over five years for agricultural subsidies with the majority of those funds supporting conventional farming. The federal financial support for sustainable farming is extremely low by comparison, and the shift from conventional to regenerative is difficult.

Economic Barriers to Adoption

“It’s expensive to be an organic, regenerative farmer,” Melissa said. “You have higher labor costs, you make different kinds of investments, it’s a more complicated method of farming, and certification costs money.”

Slow transition time: The transition period from conventional to organic certified is three years, and during that time the farmer cannot sell the food with an organic premium despite farming organically.
Lack of information: Rich pointed out that small-scale farmers, especially those living rurally and experiencing extreme poverty, often don’t know how to find markets, negotiate for better prices, and understand the economic outputs of their own farms. Existing resources are hard to access without basic literacy and access to the internet. “Getting information to the end user is critical,” he said.

Promising Developments

Farmers Educating Farmers

It’s critical that farmers teach one another. “We know that farmers learn best from farmers,” said Rich. To leverage this insight, Opportunity International is setting up a mentorship program in rural African farming communities and building its educational tools around insights gathered from the local farmers themselves. Rich mentioned OI’s agricultural team in Rwanda has implemented a system of “farmer support agents.” He says, “They get a bicycle, a pair of boots, a smartphone, and training, and in exchange they take the learnings out into their communities and spread it amongst the farmers in that community.”

Melissa also pointed to the Transition to Organic Partnership Program, which helps provide resources to aspiring organic and regenerative farmers. “Paying farmers to talk to farmers: that is really where the information gets transferred, because it’s often not as simple as reading a couple sentences. You need someone there to show you, to explain it to you, to demonstrate.”

Technological Advancements

Recent developments in technology, especially in the AI sector, have exciting implications for agriculture and education.

Precision agriculture: With better instruments, companies and farmers can manage their farms more effectively. Robotic tools that monitor the soil, for instance, can inform users when they need to irrigate, look for pests, know when to apply pesticides, and so forth. “I think this is actually going to reduce the use of some of the more toxic synthetic chemicals on even conventional farms,” Melissa said. “Any stop toward eliminating or reducing the use of those chemicals is good.”
Agricultural education: Using generative AI and other tools, Rich and the Digital Innovation Group at Opportunity International are building a WhatsApp chatbot to help rural farmers in the field get answers to their questions. Given many might be illiterate, the bot can take verbal inputs in the farmers’ native languages, and it can analyze pictures of crops to determine diseases and offer advice.

Climate and Economic Resilience

Farms that practice regenerative agriculture withstand both market pressures and extreme weather. "You're more resilient to drought. You’re more resilient to heat. Your yields will remain higher in the face of a drastic climatic event,” Melissa said.

Community relevance: Paul extrapolated this concept into economic resilience for whole communities by extension, using White Oak Pastures as an example. “They employ nearly a couple hundred people in their local community,” he said. “That’s economic resilience at all levels. The way to try to think about economic resilience is to think locally, think regionally, think within the Puget Sound to try to solve the problem in that domain if you have the chance.”
Interested customers: If consumers remain willing to pay the price premium for organic food, regenerative products will likely also do well on the market provided the certification issues are solved.
Shifting markets: Melissa mentioned market research by the Organic Trade Association that found young people driving demand for organic food. “Younger generations are faced with this existential crisis of climate change, are recognizing that eating is a political act, and that their food choices actually have social, environmental, and economic impacts. And they are willing to make the investment to go organic and regenerative.”

a crowd of attendees mingles in the Tactile event space — Attendees mingle before the panel.

Reflections

As the panel ended, the discussion was far from over with an insightful Q&A and further networking discussion. Dan Schiaffo, a consultant at Slalom who is currently pursuing a master’s program focused on sustainability, was left thinking about how to shift the public’s focus from organic to regenerative. “This sort of conversation is music to my ears. I absolutely love it,” he said.

Pamela Cardone shared the recent documentary Common Ground as a resource. The question of how to inspire conventional farms to use regenerative methods —even those who are hostile towards sustainability — piqued her interest as a financial risk analyst. “We have to show that they will make more money, even without the principles.” She wants to put her risk knowledge to better use in this space.

Several attendees were intimately familiar with the challenges growers face as growers themselves. George Thomas owns an alfalfa farm and recently got a grant from Tilth Alliance to plant a food forest and a prairie strip. The difficulty of growing alfalfa means that getting organic certified is a very unlikely prospect, but he still wants to make the farm more regenerative. “It’s important work. I think I could get there, eventually.”

Andrew Tuttle, a permaculture expert and educator currently restoring a historic farm in Arlington, is creating an online learning platform where participants can partake in virtual tours of regenerative lands. He wanted to stress that there is big investment in the field from nongovernmental sources. “The thing is, regenerative farming can make people really, really rich,” he said. “We don’t talk about that enough, and if it were more widely known, we could convince more farms to make the switch.”

He was excited to attend the event and wished there were more like it in his field. “We just need a pure opportunity to get together because the future of this industry depends on community. Cultural relationship-building comes from working together, and this is the way you do that.”

Zachary Gray from Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies, a company that is using fungi to protect plants from heat stress and difficult environments, echoed that sentiment.

The diversity of backgrounds and professions present at the event highlight just how interdisciplinary the challenge of implementing regenerative agriculture is, and the networking that took place promises that this wicked challenge has ever more brilliant minds working on it. A huge thank you to our panelists and everyone who attended.

Follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected to this vibrant and growing community, and we hope to see you at our next event in the fall.

Resources

Coalition for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) is a coalition of farmers, businesses, organizations, and activists advocating for progressive programs and policies in support of organic and regenerative agriculture in Washington State. The Tilth Alliance is one of the 11 member organizations.
White Oak Pastures transitioned away from industrial agriculture techniques in 1995 and began operating their farm as a living ecosystem. They now raise 10 species of humanely treated animals, and the land is managed to increase living organic matter. They employ more than 155 members of their local community.
Common Ground Film is the sequel to Kiss the Ground, which the filmmakers claim inspired the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The film explores the money, power, and politics intertwined in our broken food system and profiles farmers using regenerative agriculture models that could stabilize the climate, improve health, and grow America’s economy.
Transition to Organic Partnership Program is investing up to $100 million over five years in cooperative agreements with non-profit organizations providing technical assistance support, training, education, and outreach to aspiring organic farmers.
The Nature Conservancy supports building regenerative food systems and has a variety of resources on regenerative practices, food system solutions, technological innovations, as well as their Foodscapes Report, which provides a global perspective on necessary food systems transitions to meet “this century’s most pressing challenge: the threats posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and increased demand on the integrity of the global food system.”
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast is a podcast for professional growers and agronomists who want to learn about the science and principles of regenerative agriculture systems to increase quality, yield, and profitability.
Noble Research Institute was founded in 1945 and is the nation’s largest nonprofit dedicated to farm and ranch management education to build soil health and increase profitability on U.S. farms and ranches. The organization has an entire category of research dedicated to regenerative agriculture.

Agriculture

Five Lessons for social sector organizations that want to partner with the private sector

James Bernard
Dec 7, 2023
7 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

If you work at a social-sector organization, it can be intimidating and sometimes difficult to work with private sector companies. One key to successful partnerships is understanding how companies work. My last article was understanding international development organizations, how they work, and why you might (or might not) want to partner with them to solve business challenges.

Now, I want to turn the tables and look at partnership from the corporate perspective. If you work at a social impact organization (donors, multilaterals, NGOs, etc.) what should you keep in mind when designing partnerships or programs with corporate partners?

Quick story. When I led a teacher training initiative at Microsoft, I often spoke at conferences attended by social sector representatives. I could practically see people’s eyes turning into dollar signs when they heard where I worked. The stark reality was that our entire budget for a worldwide program was tens of millions of dollars, which left little room for transactional donations to organizations. The vast majority of the $250M program went to the field to help train teachers and school leaders. To drive global initiatives, we had to rely on strategic engagements where we could co-design a partnership that would be mutually beneficial.

Several years ago, I met several representatives from a large, UK-based educational NGO. In initial discussions we discovered that our organizations broadly agreed that the best way for students to learn 21st century skills (creativity, collaboration, communications, etc.) was to train teachers on using technology to support innovative teaching and learning practices. We arranged for a second meeting at Microsoft’s HQ near Seattle to hash out a partnership.

The London-based team arrived, ready to ask us for millions of dollars to sponsor several of their programs (I learned this later). I started the meeting by saying we wouldn’t talk about money. We’d instead focus on the challenges each organization faced, quantifying the assets we could bring into a partnership, and only then determine if a partnership made sense.

I could tell they were shocked. They told me later they’d expected to walk away with a check. This, of course, led to the inevitable “valley of despair” that seems to be a part of every partnership negotiation. A day later, we were joined by one of their colleagues from Kenya. He immediately helped us understand the perspective from the field and build a program that would address education reform from a policy perspective. We ended up building a successful multi-year partnership to reach thousands of education policymakers. So, the discussion became more about what we could do, rather than how we would fund it. And the funding indeed followed the program.

In the years since that story, I’ve worked with dozens of multinational companies to design successful partnerships. Here are four key lessons I’ve learned about working with companies:

Lesson 1: Think Transformation, Not Transaction

The first lesson is to design partnerships that are transformational, rather than transactional. Don’t assume that your corporate partners necessarily have budget to write a check to support your organization or your existing programs. Yes, there are corporate foundations that have money and will give grants to non-profit organizations, and there is value in this. But if you want to develop a truly transformational partnership, you should get smart about how your organization can solve the business issues a company may be facing.

Can you help them reach new customers? Do you have experience and networks of farmers that can help drive sustainability in a supply chain? Do you work on labor or land rights issues that might be relevant? Do you have a unique way of reaching the last mile of consumers? Then, think about a company’s non-financial assets and how they can be leveraged to improve the work you do, whether it’s their technical expertise, reach, channels, or scale. In other words, try to think more like a business.

Lesson 2: Companies Are Not Monolithic

I’ve heard many people at non-profit organizations express skepticism about the ambitions and goals of prospective corporate partners. It’s true that many companies have aspects of their business or past issues that are less than ideal (labor issues, unhealthy products, murky supply chains, etc.), but that should not necessarily negate the possibilities to partner with that company. Think about a company that makes products that might be unhealthy if consumed in large quantities. At the same time, that company may be working to create more sustainable supply chains, improving labor practices in its factories, and working to guarantee better opportunities for women. In other words, both things can be true: a company can have issues and can also be doing the right thing.  

Of course, you should determine where your organization wants to draw the line on which companies to work with. Decide what aspects of a company’s business can extend your mission and which would be detrimental to it. For example, in a previous role, we were approached by a foundation that was funded by the tobacco industry. We were crystal clear that we had no desire to push the agenda or grow the revenue of tobacco companies. However, as we got to know the organization better, we recognized that there were in fact areas of alignment. The team that approached us was working with smallholder tobacco farmers in some of the least-developed countries on earth. These farmers’ livelihoods would be decimated by decreasing demand for tobacco worldwide, and they needed to explore alternative commodities and markets. After much consideration, analysis, and internal debate, we decided to work with the organization because working to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers fit squarely in our mission.

Lesson 3: Understand the Corporate Structure

It’s important to understand the corporate structure of a prospective partner, and the motivations and incentives of groups in the company. In its most basic form, a company sources raw materials from factories, farms or mines (or develop intellectual property); develops products to meet a customer need; and sells those products to customers (consumers or businesses). The goal is revenue growth and (usually) shareholder value. Within this basic structure there’s a ton of nuance, and the dynamics in any big organization are inevitably complex and unique. For example, you might work with a corporate sustainability team that is trying to improve a broad range of practices across a wide variety of supply chains and issue areas. They may be responsible for greenhouse gas emission reductions, reducing poor labor practices, preventing deforestation, or a host of other issues. To achieve their goals, people on the team will need to partner with procurement, legal and government affairs, communications, marketing/brand, product design/packaging, manufacturing and operations, and treasury teams. They need to manage projects, partnerships and programs with field teams that might have different motivations (e.g., getting the best price for goods or meeting quarterly sales targets) and incentive structures. Any corporate manager will tell you that a large part of their job is managing expectations and driving influence across a matrixed organization. Before moving forward with any partnership discussions, spend time mapping the internal groups that your counterpart may be working with, and how they may contribute to (or block) a partnership, program, or product development. This can be done through external research or by simply asking your contacts who they work with and what the opportunities or challenges might be. These internal stakeholders should be part of any co-creation process. 

Lesson 4: Recognize HQ vs. Field Dynamics

The opportunity to partner with companies can come from many different areas or geographies, and each company operates differently when it comes to the headquarters vs. the field. In some cases, field teams are fully empowered and have the budget to develop and execute partnerships. In other cases, field teams may be completely dependent on corporate support and may in fact have their objectives and strategies dictated to them by HQ. These dynamics will dictate the power dynamics at play and can influence the success of your partnership.

In any case, if you are developing a partnership that will operate at the field level, you and your corporate partner will likely need to get buy-in and commitment from field teams. These teams will often be responsible for sourcing or for selling, depending on what part of the business you are working with, and their goals may not be well aligned with the longer-term objectives of a strategic partnership. This is again when it becomes super important to understand the business objectives of your partner. Think about what’s in it for the field reps of your partner: For example, how would improving irrigation practices at the farm level increase yield and quality, two things that a field agronomist might care about? Will a program focused on small and medium enterprises in villages help a field salesperson achieve their targets for the year?

Lesson 5: Recognize Your Value to the Relationship

It’s important to recognize – and help your partners recognize – that you bring a lot to the table in any partnership, even if your organization is smaller or less well known. Make sure that you clearly articulate the value of your organizational assets, your mission, and your ability to execute. Recognizing your value also means that you don’t need to acquiesce to urgent timelines around an announcement deadline, event, or the need to sign an MOU. Some companies move quickly with an attitude of “getting it done and worrying about the details later.” I’ve seen too many partnerships fail because something that looked good on paper has no real meat on the bones. While there might be very good reasons to work toward a deadline, it’s imperative that you and your partner take the time to think through partnership governance, roles and responsibilities, and success metrics. Don’t be afraid to push on this, even if you are working with a well-known international brand; it will pay off in the long term.

Of course, every company is different, and every partnership has unique dynamics. Building a successful partnership is first and foremost dependent on establishing strong relationships with the people you’ll work with. Once you establish trust, define common objectives and build a mutual understanding of what you want to achieve together, I hope you can use the lessons above to build great partnerships.