Agribusiness Hub

Scaling Regenerative Agriculture

The Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Agribusiness Hub was launched in 2020 with the aim of accelerating the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices within the industry, while ensuring positive partnerships with the world's farmers.

The Current State of Play

Despite clear long-term benefits, the rate of farmers adopting regenerative agriculture has been slow due to the costs of changing existing practices, the lack of knowledge on regenerative practices, and the misalignment of value chain drivers. According to sustainability analysts Systemiq, the regenerative farming growth rate must triple to reach 40% of global cropland, and deliver against the planet’s need to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees.

What Business Can Do to Drive Change

To progress the adoption of regenerative practices, the Agribusiness Hub has focused on three value chain case studies - notably Basmati rice in India, potatoes in the United Kingdom and wheat in the United States. The findings from these case studies were shared in the Hub's 2022 'Scaling Regenerative Farming: An Action Plan', which details five key issues which require urgent action to make regenerative farming more appealing to farmers. The Big Five are:

• Costs: Create mechanisms to share the cost of farmers' transition with other stakeholders

• Sourcing: Develop new sourcing models to share transition costs across the value chains

• Income: Build farmers' income from environmental outcomes

• Policy: Ensure government policy enables and rewards farmers for transitioning

• Metrics: Agree on common metrics to measure environmental outcomes

In 2023, the Hub brought together the different members of the agribusiness value chain (e.g. financial institutions, food manufacturers, farmer organisations and others) to map out the levers that could unlock the Big Five issues. Four levers were identified and defined to be farmer-centric and practical. The Levers for Implementation are:

• Financial: develop funding and de-risking mechanisms, and new sourcing models

• Ecosystem Service Market: make environmental outcomes pay

• Policy: ensure government policy rewards farmers on their transition journey

• Metrics: set up common metrics to measure and monetise outcomes

Put together, these four levers aim to provide farmers with a menu of options to choose from to start and continue their transition towards regenerative agriculture. This menu of options is what we call our Blueprint, and is made of financial incentives, de-risking mechanisms, technical support, and peer-to-peer support.

The Hub members, alongside financial institutions, are now looking to test this approach and deploy this menu of options on pilots in different regions. This implementation phase will serve to adapt and refine our approach to scaling regenerative agriculture.

Further Information

For Hub enquiries please contact:

Email: info@sustainable-markets.org