Regenerative agriculture: experts urge goals built around local challenges, not just acreage
Representatives of The Nature Conservancy and General Mills argue that regenerative agriculture targets should respond to the defining challenge of each landscape rather than only measuring the acreage covered.
Stephen Wood, a senior scientist at the environmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Steve Rosenzweig, a principal scientist at food producer General Mills, call for landscape-scale regenerative agriculture strategies in a guest article published by AgFunderNews. They argue that lasting environmental gains cannot be secured simply by counting the acres on which certain farming practices have been adopted. Regenerative agriculture is an approach aimed at improving soil, water and biodiversity.
Why place matters
More than 100 major companies have pledged to advance regenerative agriculture across millions of acres by 2030. According to the authors, the main environmental problems depend on the specific location. In western Kansas, the central issue is falling groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer, which threatens the long-term resilience of agriculture and rural communities. In the Upper Midwest of the United States, nutrient runoff degrades water quality. General Mills sources wheat from the Kansas region.
The authors say a strategy should focus on one defining challenge that stakeholders can rally around. In Kansas, that means not just expanding regenerative agriculture but reducing pressure on the Ogallala Aquifer over time.
Learning as part of strategy
TNC and General Mills have worked together to adapt TNC's approach to monitoring, evaluation and learning. It involves spelling out a "theory of change", meaning assumptions about how change will happen in a given place, and testing them in practice. For example, it asks whether trusted groundwater information is influencing decisions, whether financing mechanisms are lowering producer risk, and whether market signals sufficiently support lower-water production systems.
The authors stress that outcome tracking, including through the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), supports accountability but does not show whether a strategy is addressing landscape-level problems. They advise companies to invest in learning capacity alongside sustainability targets and to coordinate action around each landscape's defining challenges.
