Fewer and fewer farmers are joining Europe’s regenerative agriculture movement, and by 2023 their numbers were falling. Over the same years, the world’s largest food companies have pledged billions to it. Those two curves, heading in opposite directions, sit at the heart of a study of 849 actors in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal, published in npj Sustainable Agriculture. Its question is simple: who speaks for regenerative agriculture today, and what does that change on the ground?

The word left the farm

Regenerative agriculture was born in the field. Its first adopters committed between 1980 and 2010, and the movement was led by farmers. Then it took off. From 2016, commitments grew almost exponentially, and between 2016 and 2020 the people making them changed. Processors, banks and NGOs moved in, and the term began to travel far from the farms where it started.

A map makes this visible. The densest clusters sit in capital cities, in the headquarters of Cargill and Unilever, of banks like ABN AMRO, of NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance. Paris alone counts 69 actors. Farmers are elsewhere, spread across very different soils and climates, often on small farms, with mixed crop-livestock systems, agroforestry and market gardening leading the way. On the corporate side, regenerative agriculture now shows up in animal feed and pet food, in ketchup, beer, whisky and coffee, carried by companies with more than 100,000 employees.

The authors, led by Loekie Schreefel with Ken Giller and Hannah van Zanten among others, have a word for this: co-optation. A practice built by farmers is turning into a marketing agenda written elsewhere.

Fewer farmers, more money

From 2021, the movement slowed. In 2023 it declined, and the drop came from farmers: fewer of them signed on. The authors leave the cause open. Farmers may have reached saturation, lost interest, or turned to agroecology instead.

Corporate commitments tell another story. According to figures cited in the study, 86% of the world’s top 100 food companies have pledged support for regenerative agriculture, with more than $3.2 billion invested. At COP28, 26 agrifood companies promised to bring 160 million hectares and 3.6 million farmers into the fold by 2030. Small farmers organized in local networks cannot match that weight. And whoever carries the most weight ends up defining the word. The risk the authors point to is a definition shaped around corporate margins rather than around soils, ecosystems and the people who farm them.

One verb splits the movement

Ask a regenerative farmer what the word means, and you are likely to hear: stop. Stop plowing, stop synthetic pesticides, stop synthetic fertilizers. That is the position of 61% of the farmers in the study. Ask a processor, and the verb changes. Eight in ten talk about reducing.

There is an honest reason for that. A processor buys from many farmers at different stages of transition, on different soils. No-till works for a dairy farmer on sandy ground, while a grower on heavy clay may still need to work the soil. But “reduce” rarely comes with a number or a date. How much less, and by when? Left unanswered, the verb opens the door to greenwashing.

The same imbalance runs through the whole vocabulary. Nearly all the practices cited are technical rules. Only 2% speak of values: fair wages, long-term partnerships, time off for farmers, economic independence for women. And about a hundred actors name organic farming itself as a regenerative practice, far more than those citing agroecology or conservation agriculture.

A story about soil and biodiversity, with people at the edges

Everyone agrees on where regeneration begins: in the soil. Eight actors in ten put soil health first, seven in ten biodiversity. Cover crops, crop diversification and agroforestry dominate the practices, and each country adds its own accent. Dutch farmers focus on ending synthetic pesticides, the Portuguese on syntropic agroforestry, the Germans on mulching, the Spanish on bringing crops and livestock back together.

What gets left out is just as telling. Animal welfare comes last, cited by a third of actors. Farmers’ incomes and working lives stay in the background. Food itself barely appears: no actor puts healthy diets among its main themes. As it is promoted today, the authors note, regenerative agriculture can feed a healthy diet as easily as an unhealthy one.

Why one buyer is never enough

This is the finding that matters most for companies. Corporate pledges were supposed to flow down to suppliers, large farms included. They have not. In Europe, the farmers who call themselves regenerative are mostly small. They sell through short supply chains, close to their customers, and earn a premium for what they do.

Large farms live in another world. They produce for export, run on high inputs and depend on subsidies, while part of their environmental and social costs lands on others. To change, they would have to take those costs back and accept the risk of lower yields. Someone has to pay for that.

And a farm is never one crop. It is a rotation, sold to several buyers. The study points to sugar beets in the Netherlands and Germany, wine grapes in France and Portugal, olives in Spain: one buyer backing one crop cannot carry the whole farm. A farm makes the switch when all of its buyers commit. That requires food chains that pay for more than yield, and production costs that include what agriculture does to ecosystems and to people.

The proof is still in the field

The authors also ask what holds up. Some popular practices rest on thin evidence, like compost tea, and the benefits claimed for many biostimulants and inoculants are increasingly questioned. Soil carbon has been oversold: organic matter keeps soils alive, but storing carbon should not be the reason to manage them. Pest control, in their view, plays out at the scale of the landscape, with hedgerows, woodlands and natural areas where predators find shelter.

Public policy, meanwhile, has placed its bet elsewhere. Agroecology has made its way into the FAO, the IPCC and the global biodiversity framework. Regenerative agriculture is left to private certification schemes that compete with one another, with no agreement on what they should verify. The authors compare it to letting the fox guard the henhouse.

Their conclusion sets the bar. Regenerative agriculture will be judged on one thing: its capacity to regenerate ecosystems and social relationships. Until it shows that, its impact remains uncertain.

Our reading: answers to the three questions the study leaves open

The study asks who defines regenerative agriculture, who pays for it, and what proves it works. We start from another angle: how a company builds its path toward regeneration with the farmers, the land and the territory it depends on. We read that path in four levels: limit, reduce, restore and regenerate. Here is how it answers the study.

Who defines it: aiming for regenerative agriculture is a different state from practicing it

We build regenerative agriculture (in French) on organic farming, together with fair trade. Starting outside organic can be a step, as long as the path toward organic is explicit and committed. The actors in the study who name organic as a regenerative practice point the same way.

From there, we separate two states. A supplier program that improves one or two aspects of farming aims for regenerative agriculture. Practicing it means covering four pillars at once: the environment (soils, water, biodiversity), the social pillar (farmers’ well-being, fairness, the territory), the economy (guaranteed prices, long-term contracts, viability) and the supply chain (traceability and governance from field to shelf). And these pillars hold together as one system: the price makes the practices possible, the practices create the quality of the product, and that quality justifies the price. A list of labels side by side is a sum. Regeneration is the circulation between them.

Reducing inputs is the Reduce level

A supplier program that cuts inputs with no deadline sits at the Reduce level. That level is complete when a company stops its pressures on the ecosystems it relies on, where it operates, without offsetting elsewhere: that is what we mean by net zero (in French). Farmers who end synthetic pesticides and fertilizers on an organic foundation reach the top of that level. The Restore level follows, when the company’s activity strengthens what it depends on. Regeneration comes when the business model increases the capacity of living systems to thrive, so that the territory and its inhabitants prosper with the business, and the business with them.

Who pays: every buyer at the table, and a premium for virtue shown on the product

The study’s finding on buyers matches the economics of mutuality we work with. Partners co-invest over time, through multi-year contracts, pre-financed harvests and shared processing tools, and share the gains fairly, with accounts kept in triple impact, as set out in our framing note on triple profitability (in French). A farm makes the shift when its buyers commit together, across the whole rotation.

The study leaves buyers to find premiums large enough. Our answer: the consumer pays, at every purchase, and the practice is shown on the product through a certification that commits to it. The economics of mutuality then carries that price back to the farm. Regulation deals with the worst practices. A premium for virtue rewards the best ones, built on practices and their return across the triple impact, in a given place.

Certification that commits to a practice

The study distrusts private certification, and rightly flags the risk of companies grading their own suppliers. We draw the line between a company’s in-house standards and an independent label that commits a farm to a practice, such as Regenerative Organic Certified, which builds on organic certification (how labels line up from organic to regenerative, in French). Public authorities and companies each have their part: rules set the floor, the label rewards those who go further.

The proof starts with the practice

Good practices for living systems produce good, measurable results. Good results, on their own, do not prove good practices. The proof starts in the field, with the practice, then comes the label on the product, then the measurement of impacts. Regeneration shows in the capacity of soils, water, biodiversity and communities to thrive, and measurement follows from that.

Value is created with nature, in a territory

We read regenerative agriculture across the triple impact: the environment (soils, water, biodiversity), the social pillar, the economy, and then the territory. We start from what the land, its biodiversity and the people who live there gain, a benefit that ultimately meets the company’s own. The study places pest control at the scale of the landscape, with hedgerows and woodlands. That is where regeneration plays out for us: a coalition around a product and a place, where each partner, from the farm to the buyer, carries its share. The gaps the study reveals are part of that work too: farmers’ incomes, working conditions and the nutritional quality of food, the quality that justifies the price and pays for the practices.

Source

Schreefel, L., Steenman, E., Adler, F., Buffara, R., Freundt, S., DeClerck, F., Duncan, J., Giller, K. E., Koster, H. & van Zanten, H. H. E. (2025). Beyond the buzz: analyzing actors promoting regenerative agriculture in Europe. npj Sustainable Agriculture, 3, 59. nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00100-1. Corporate investment and COP28 figures as cited in the study.