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.”
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 Filmis 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 Conservancysupports 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 Podcastis 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 Institutewas 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.
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The Revolving Door Problem: Internal Alignment is Critical Before Pursuing Partnerships
James Bernard
Dec 12, 2023
3 min read
Updated: Jan 4, 2024
How many times have you visited a partner organization only to find out that others from your organization have just met with the same people? It happens all the time. Several years ago, I was waiting in the lobby of a well-known government institution waiting for a meeting I’d scheduled to talk about potential partnerships. I looked up and was surprised to see two colleagues from my organization leaving the building at the same time – figuratively I was going in the revolving door as they were coming out! I flagged them down and learned that they’d just met with a team that was adjacent to the one I was waiting to see.
This posed several obvious problems. First, we potentially wasted people’s time because we hadn’t coordinated our schedules, which is not a great way to engender confidence and trust with the partner. Second, because we weren’t coordinated on our messaging and pitch, we risked sowing confusion about what we could really bring to the table, therefore weakening our negotiating position. Finally, being disorganized damaged our reputation as an organization that could be relied upon to deliver on a partnership.
In that case, my colleagues and I quickly recognized that we were putting our partnerships and organizational reputation at risk. We compared notes in the lobby and salvaged our relationships by building a more unified approach for future meetings. No real damage was done, and in fact, we created a stronger partnership by working together.
The Revolving Door Problem is extremely common in big organizations, even if you don’t literally run into colleagues in the lobby. I recently met a sustainability director who had been approached by no fewer than three representatives from the same NGO about developing a partnership. He was lamenting to me that he wasn’t sure which team had the lead or should be relied upon to deliver on a partnership.
The challenge often begins with a lack of role clarity or ownership of key relationships with prospective partners. Responsibility for social impact partnerships is often distributed through a large organization at both the HQ and field levels. At a company, it might sit in the CSR group, a marketing team, a product team, or procurement organization. At an NGO, it can sit with individual project teams, in business development, or as part of a strategy function. At government agencies, responsibility could be shared across any number of offices at HQ or the field.
So, how can organizations avoid the Revolving Door Problem, or at least minimize it?
First, internal coordination is key. Before anyone at an organization engages with external partners, it’s critical to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve through a partnership, how that partnership would advance the objectives of your organization and the partner, and who should approach prospective partners.
Second, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the organization(s) you are approaching. What partnerships have they done in the past and how did they originate? Are there different divisions or business units within the partner that might have different goals in a partnership? Who have been the champions of cross-sector partnerships at the organization?
Finally, map out what your organization can bring to a partnership. Determine the key assets that might have value to another organization – these could be expertise, access to stakeholders, channels, credibility, funding, or content. Decide how these assets can be complimentary to the partner, and how they might be valued. Is there a timeline for execution of the partnership, and how would you see it being managed? How are you going to measure your results?
Some larger organizations have developed a partnership account management structure, similar to what you might see in a fundraising, business development, or sales function. In this model, it’s the responsibility of each account manager to have a complete understanding of prospective partners, their motivations, competitors, industry dynamics, and operations. In some cases, an account manager may handle several partners from the same sector, industry or region. In other cases, when the partner is large or complex (and if staffing allows), a single account manager may be assigned to a single organization. All communications to prospective partners should – initially at least – be run through the account manager and all explorations and meetings should be tracked in a Customer Relationship Management tool like Salesforce or HubSpot.
There’s no question that cross-sector collaborations are challenging and complex, especially if more than two partners are involved. But one way to build a foundation for a strong partnership is to avoid the Revolving Door Problem in the first place.
