10-year search trends for regenerative and sustainable agriculture CREDIT: TRENDS.GOOGLE.COM

Semantically, "sustainable" may offer survival, but "regenerative" invokes hope and therefore inspires a more positive vision. In practice, regenerative agriculture is based on a set of agricultural principles who seek to work with nature to help it prosper rather than simply cut its losses. The central focus is farming in a way that improves soil health, because that's what allows the proverbial goose to continue laying even more and better eggs in the long run.

Regenerative agriculture has multiple co-benefits including increased agricultural profitability, soil carbon sequestration, habitat restoration, resistance to drought and flooding, higher nutrient density, and reduced erosion and toxic runoff. Unless you're the chemical salesman, there are a lot of things you like.

In my experience, the benefits of regenerative agriculture are real, but there is a real and fundamental problem: a few pretty wildflowers don't grow in a meadow. Although some confuse the current state of affairs with its limit, critics in my opinion are pointing to the right question: can regenerative agriculture really scale?

Technically, it is not a problem. Integrated ecosystems of plants and animals getting better at capturing solar energy while cultivating living soil is what life on earth has been doing for at least 540 million years. We could even say that such regenerative systems are the only thing we know for sure that they work on a planetary scale. But the effort to produce food and fiber by and for humans is more complicated.

More and more farmers are learning about these principles, but connecting to markets remains a challenge. Farmers markets that connect thoughtful consumers directly with regenerative farmers are wonderful. The world would be better off with more of them. But there are good reasons why people active in a busy world buy most of their food at grocery stores. Grocery stores are the final distribution point for today's global industrial food supply chains that have been assembled for decades. Behind each shelf is a system of trucks, warehouses, and processing plants that have evolved to deliver a consistent product at affordable prices to consumers around the world.

But not too long ago, the same could have been said about coal-fired power plants and the monolithic network that connected them to your wall outlet.

From my perspective, regenerative agriculture is now where the renewable energy industry was more than 25 years ago. Back then, coal wagons crisscrossed the country, and the only person with a solar panel on the roof was your crazy Uncle Harry in Idaho, who just wanted to live off the grid.

WESTHAMPTON, NJ - JULY 15: SunEdison employees install photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of a Kohl's department store on July 15, 2008 in Westhampton, NJ. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images)

But then the entrepreneurs appeared.

These entrepreneurs brought new technologies to the market, such as cheaper or more efficient solar panels and larger wind turbines. They also invented new business models that offered both investors and consumers options to put their money where their mouths were.

Pioneering entrepreneurs like Sun Edison began building larger-scale solar projects, and then-young companies like Green Mountain Power began differentiating alleged commodities for large numbers of discerning consumers. Even amid the long-term mixed success of such pioneers, these enterprising companies were catalysts for change at scale, such that renewables are now cost competitive with fossil fuels in many parts of the world, and the next generation of innovators carry the transition forward.

With regenerative agriculture now widely proven on a small scale, it is time for forward-thinking entrepreneurs and investors to also step up and help the sector expand its reach. Without scale, the benefits of regenerative agriculture will remain a dream. Only scale can lower costs and increase scope to the point where regenerative foods become everyday foods connecting more mouths to more acres in a food system that actually creates a positive impact on the whole.

Large-scale regenerative grazing at Birdwell & Clark Ranch in Henrietta, TX. CREDIT: RUSS CONSER

Technology can help, but it is not a silver bullet. In regenerative agriculture, the role of new technology is not to replace or fight nature, but to understand and help it. Technology can absolutely help us to do things like count and track carbon (eg Regrow Ag), move cows (eg Vence), track production (eg AgriWebb), and measure nutrients (eg BFA). But technology alone is not enough.

In my opinion, new and scalable business models represent the greatest opportunity for catalytic innovation. Novel business models will be needed to bring more different products to more people and places along different supply routes. In the same way that companies like Uber disrupted urban transportation with a different shape to match riders with drivers, new business models can aggregate food supply and demand while operating more diverse and flexible supply networks. and distribution (eg Barn2Door , CrowdCow ). Novel business models may also have an especially important role to play in pricing and trading associated benefits (eg Nori, Grass Roots Carbon), and could even define entirely new asset classes (eg Group of intrinsic exchange). Just as Uber, Amazon, and Tesla were once the fancy names for the world's new business models, the complexities of a new “field to fork” food system present a tremendous opportunity for big new brands to produce and deliver new and honest promises.

One final point for emphatic clarity: “scale” does NOT mean repeating the go-big-or-go tragedy that defined XNUMXth-century agriculture. In nature, scale doesn't necessarily come from a few big things, more often it comes from connecting the small and many. After all, there is more biomass in ants than there are elephants on this planet.

Likewise, the big headlines can still play, but you'd be smart to remember that it was the smaller dinosaurs called "birds" that adapted and thrived when the world changed. You would be wise to keep your eyes on nimble upstarts creating dynamic, distributed, multi-scale supply chains, rather than heavyweight, centralized, monolithic ones. And while many will try to simply mimic outward appearances, sticking some fur onto their hides and pretending to be mammals won't work either. A real transformation from a degenerative to a regenerative food system is required.

Although the path is confusing, the goal is clear: now is the time to turn wildflower gardens into meadows. It is time for regenerative agriculture to scale or die.