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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

Four types of international development organizations and how they work

James Bernard
Dec 14, 2023
7 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

Thousands of organizations are working in developing countries to help improve livelihoods across a broad range or sectors. They are often looking for private sector partners, but unpacking the landscape can be confusing.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve worked in both the private sector and international development sector. As a result, I’ve found myself having to do a lot of translating between these very different worlds; one is driven by profits and revenue, and the other is driven by mission. Timelines, budgets, fiscal cycles are all different and mired in their own complexities.

Lately I’ve been thinking about why it’s so hard for those who work in industry to understand international development (a future blog will look at this from the opposite angle). This came up as we’ve been building the Global Impact Collective over the last several months. A few members of the collective come from more traditional backgrounds, and therefore would never have interacted with international development organizations.

It's not uncommon. Many corporate sustainability and social impact leaders I’ve worked with don’t have a clear understanding of international development organizations, their incentives, and why they might want to work together (or not) to achieve a common goal. This is understandable. Every industry has its own nuances, complexities, competitors, and collaborators.

If you are a corporate leader who wants to build partnerships with organizations working in international development, it’s first important to understand your own organization’s motivations, objectives, and assets. I can’t stress this enough. It’s very difficult to create effective and sustainable partnerships until you understand what you have to offer, why others would find this valuable, and what you are trying to achieve.

The next thing you should do is conduct a thorough landscape assessment of prospective partners working in the same geographical areas or working to solve the same problems. This will help create a targeted list of organizations and a greater understanding of what they might bring to the table. Key questions are:

How would this partner help advance my organization’s mission or goals in a particular area (geographic, crop, social mission, etc.)?
What assets do they bring to the table – funding, scale, research, etc.?
What other companies are they partnering with?
What is their mission, incentives, what are their overall objectives, and what kind of timelines do they work on?
What is their primary purpose – implementation, thought leadership, research, funding, scale, etc. – and how, generally, do they work?

In this assessment you will inevitably come across a wide range of organizations with confusing overlaps. We hope the is a brief primer below will help you unpack some of the confusion. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list or comprehensive categorization. As with anything, there are grey areas, lots of nuance, and different points of view. If you ever find yourself wondering about an organization, feel free to reach out. I’ve probably worked with them.

Bilateral Donors

Bilateral donors provide direct foreign assistance from one government to another. They usually have a permanent presence within the government and are often housed under the department of foreign affairs or another unit that executes foreign policy.

In the United States, the primary foreign aid agency is USAID, a 60-year-old Executive-branch agency which is a critical part of the US foreign assistance budget, which is approved by Congress each year. USAID Administrator Samantha Power was elevated to sit on the National Security Council, which shows the importance of this agency as it relates to foreign policy considerations. In addition to USAID, several other agencies also provide foreign assistance under the same budget line item, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Incidentally, the US Foreign Assistance budget is around 1 percent of the overall US Federal Budget, despite a public perception that it runs as high as 25%.

In the UK, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has a similar function to USAID. There’s an alphabet soup of other agencies across the Northern Hemisphere – SIDA (Sweden), DANIDA (Denmark), GIZ (Germany), JICA (Japan) DFAT (Australia). All deliver aid to less-developed nations based on the geopolitical considerations of their governments.

Each bilateral organization has different procurement rules and funding cycles, but many typically use an RFP process that awards contracts or grants to implementers, which can be NGOs or for-profit consultancies. The implementers then execute long-term projects (often five years or more) that run the gamut in terms of scope, sector (agriculture, humanitarian aid, education, etc.) and geographical focus.

There’s a growing trend among these bilateral donors to include a partnership component in their work. USAID, in fact, launched a Private Sector Engagement Policy in 2021 that requires every office and project to include the private sector – whether local or multinational – in project planning and execution. As part of this initiative, USAID has identified partnership managers throughout the agency and has been training staff around the world on effective partnerships. Dozens of companies have formed successful partnerships with USAID as a result of the policy.

Multilateral Organizations

This is probably the broadest and most confusing category of social-sector organizations because it’s a wide universe with many different players. At a basic level, think about multilateral organizations as membership groups for sovereign states. They were often formed as a result of decades-old treaties or international agreements as a way for nations to work more effectively together. Examples include international bodies such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Economic Forum (WEF); and regional groups like the African Union, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

I could probably write a thesis about each of these organizations (and I’m sure someone has!). While they all do important work, suffice it to say that they are often large, bureaucratic, and complex entities governed by member states with many competing priorities. The UN system alone, for example, is literally home to dozens of agencies with sometimes overlapping missions, geographies, and projects. For example, UNESCO, UNDP, and UNICEF all have projects and initiatives focused on secondary education.

Many multilaterals invest directly in government projects, research, or multinational missions (such as peacekeeping), although they do offer partnership opportunities with NGOs, corporations, and other organizations. The trick is finding the right person, in the right part of the organization, with the right remit. Unlike the bilateral donors, as a rule, don’t expect multilateral organizations to deploy large cash grants as part of a partnership.

Before developing a partnership with such an organization, make sure you have a strong understanding of the mission and work of the individual division of the agency or unit you are working with and expect each organization to have its own jargon, timelines and ways of working.

A significant subset of multi-lateral organizations are development finance institutions (DFIs) such as The World Bank, The African Development Bank, and the InterAmerican Development Bank. These organizations are funded by member states and are designed to provide financing and funding to governments for a wide range of projects, from infrastructure to economic growth to agriculture. Different DFIs focus on different geographic areas, industries, or sectors.

DFIs are a driving force – although not the only one – behind the growth in innovative financing mechanisms, which seek to tap into the estimated $212 Trillion sitting in private capital today. Because these mechanisms rely partially on investments, rather than grants, there are many opportunities for partnership. However, go in with eyes wide open; these mechanisms are incredibly complex, time consuming, and somewhat experimental. My old firm, Resonance, published a good piece on DFIs.

Family Foundations

Family Foundations are set up by high-net-worth individuals as a way of transferring some of their assets to philanthropic causes that the principles care about. Some of these – The MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation for example – are venerable institutions that have been around for decades. A more recent generation of philanthropists have launched foundations in the last 20-25 years as well, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, and the Ballmer Foundation. Thousands of smaller family foundations exist across the US (the foundation landscape is quite different in Europe; more on that in another article), and each has a unique focus based on the interests or passions of the founders.

There are many clear examples of strong, market-driven partnerships between family foundations and companies, especially in global health and financial inclusion.

NGOs

In the US, we usually refer to these organizations as “non-profits,” but internationally, mission-driven organizations are often referred to as non-governmental organizations, or NGOs. Larger NGOs like Save the Children, World Vision, Oxfam International, and CARE have dozens of offices around the world, receiving trillions of aggregate dollars from bilateral donors, multilateral organizations, and corporate and individual donors.

These organizations may employ hundreds of local staff who work in country or regional offices, often deploying several projects in a single country. Many NGOs operate on a “federated” model, with fundraising offices in developed countries that raise money for programming. For example, although World Vision’s global headquarters is just south of Seattle, but it also has affiliate organizations in Europe, Australia, the UK, and many other countries. Each raises money to support programs both domestically and in emerging markets. These federated systems leave plenty of room for confusion, lack of clear decision-making, and competing interests between country offices.

Because NGOs are mission-driven organizations, you should take the time to understand the history and motivations of the entity before reaching out for a partnership. Some have faith-based origins or missions – World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Aga Khan Foundation – while others have grown to focus on single sectors or geographic regions. For example, CARE is strongly focused on providing opportunities for women and girls.

When partnering with NGOs, make sure that mutual goals are well defined and that you set expectations about funding. I was once burned by not understanding this dynamic. Earlier in my career, I developed what I thought was a partnership between a large, US-based education non-profit and the tech company where I worked. I assumed we would mutually bring content, programming and cash to help students gain better access to sciences. What I learned later was that the organization simply wanted a large check to execute on its own programs, with a “sponsorship” from my company. Because it was a transactional agreement, we ended up with very little long-term value. An important lesson in not making assumptions!

Hopefully this guide will help you as you navigate the sometimes complex world of social impact partnerships. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, and I recognize that there are many other categories I haven’t covered, including community-based organizations (CBOs), trade and industry associations, regional economic blocs, and academic institutions, to name a few.

Bridging the world of corporate sustainability, social impact, and international development demands not just an understanding of differing objectives and cultures, but a shared vision, forged through deliberate assessment, mutual respect, and a commitment to translating aspirations into impactful partnerships. As we navigate the nuanced landscapes of profit and mission, let us remember: true collaboration knows no boundaries, only the boundless potential to create lasting, transformative change.