Written by Chris Fellows after reading Caroline Grindrod’s latest regen report
The term “regenerative agriculture” is everywhere, but what does it truly mean? As corporate giants and grassroots farmers rally behind the term, we are seeing a great divergence, a split that will define the future of our food system.
Regenerative agriculture has captured the imagination of the food and farming world, promising a future of healthy soils, thriving ecosystems and resilient farms. With billions in corporate investment and growing consumer demand, the movement is at a critical juncture. However, this surge in popularity has created a fundamental split between two distinct visions for its future.
The two streams of regenerative agriculture
On one side, we have “regenerative practices”. This is the corporate-friendly, checklist approach. It focuses on a handful of easily measurable and marketable practices like cover cropping and no-till farming. While these individual actions can offer some benefits, they often fail to deliver deep, lasting change because they are bolted onto a fundamentally extractive industrial model. This shallow version of regeneration is appealing to large corporations because it can be easily certified, marketed and controlled without requiring fundamental changes to their supply chains or business models.
On the other side is “regenerative agriculture systems”. This is the practitioner-led, holistic approach. It views the farm as a complex, living organism and focuses on whole-system transformation. This deeper form of regeneration is guided by principles like maximising biodiversity, integrating livestock and maintaining living roots in the soil year-round. Rather than a rigid set of practices, it is a journey of continuous learning and adaptation, rooted in a deep understanding of a specific place. This approach delivers far greater benefits in terms of soil health, carbon sequestration and farm profitability, but it is also more complex and challenging to implement.
What’s driving the split?
Several powerful forces are pulling these two streams apart:
- Corporate investment: The vast majority of corporate funding flows towards the “Regenerative Practices” model. It’s scalable, fits existing business structures and doesn’t threaten the status quo. This channels resources away from the more transformative, systems-based approaches.
- Carbon markets and certification: The burgeoning carbon credit market and various certification schemes inadvertently favour the checklist approach. It is far easier to measure and verify the carbon sequestered by a single practice than by a complex, integrated farm system. This creates a perverse incentive, rewarding the shallow version of regeneration while penalising deeper transformation.
- The farmer’s dilemma: For farmers on the ground, this divergence creates a difficult choice. The pragmatic path involves adopting a few corporate-backed practices to access funding and new markets. The principled path involves a more challenging, less-funded journey towards whole-system regeneration. This isn’t a failure of individual farmers; it’s a systemic failure to create conditions that support genuine, deep regeneration.
Why this matters for the future of food
The direction regenerative agriculture takes over the next five years will have profound consequences. If the shallow, corporate-led model becomes dominant, “regenerative” risks becoming another greenwashing buzzword. We might see modest environmental improvements, but the underlying industrial food system will remain unchanged, perpetuating its social and ecological problems.
However, if we can support the deeper, practitioner-led stream, we have the opportunity to create a truly transformative movement. This path leads to a food system that is more resilient, equitable and in tune with natural systems. It empowers farmers, strengthens local communities and heals our planet.
A call for true regeneration
The future of regenerative agriculture is in our hands. As farmers, we must look beyond the checklist and embrace the principles of whole-system thinking. As consumers, we must look past the labels and support farmers who are committed to deep, authentic regeneration. We must demand more than just a handful of practices; we must demand a paradigm shift.
Let’s work together to ensure that regenerative agriculture fulfils its promise, creating a food system that nourishes both people and the planet for generations to come.
You can read the full report, called The Re-Rooting of Regenerative Agriculture – Why the Next Five Years Will See a Renaissance, The Emergence of Second-Tier Agriculture: Ancient Wisdom, Emerging Science, and the Reclaiming of Integrity from Caroline Grindrod by scanning the QR code and downloading the full report.
As Caroline says in her conclusion: “We stand at a remarkable moment. The industrial agricultural paradigm that has dominated for a century is visibly failing – ecologically, economically, and spiritually. The alternatives that seemed marginal a generation ago are demonstrating their viability at scale. And emerging science is beginning to validate what traditional practitioners have known all along. The question is not whether transformation will happen, but what kind of transformation and who will lead it.”
I’m pretty sure some of the leading will be reading this article.
