Episode 124 – Regenerative Agriculture – New Mega-Trend or Splitting Organic Hairs?

August 15, 2024

ROC. Regenerative Organic Certified. Is it the new “certified organic”? Or a dead-end nano-niche for navel-gazing elites?

Part of the answer lies in regenerative ag’s ability to condemn its cousin ‘organic’ as inferior while introducing new consumers to the latest premium standard of climate-friendly agriculture.

The leading certification – ROC – rests on top of the USDA certified organic certification and adds standards for 1) Soil Health, 2) Animal Health and 3) Social Fairness.

Another certification is “Regenified” currently be used by Vital Farms and other meat producers. The 6-3-4 Regenified model appears to be more demanding, especially its land stewardship requirements, one of which is integrate livestock on site as a way to refertilize soil between crops. Most farms look at livestock and crops as a business model decision and don’t have both on site. This would appear to be a limiting factor in creating medium sized Regenified farms that can serve large volumes to retailers.

Regardless of about the dueling certifications, Google search volume for “regenerative agriculture” has grown exponentially since 2017 – a keyboard Skate Ramp of sorts. I can definitely tell you that interest in “organic” never grew this fast in the 1980s and 1990s. The movement relied on human word-of-mouth and episodic PR. Consumers were still wrapping their head around the idea of recycling their trash back then.  Organic did not take off at scale until the mid-2000s (before high-speed internet was universal) in large part due to the USDA validating the standard and issuing a nationally unified symbol and standards process for the benefit of consumer transparency.

Regenerative agriculture consumer demand is growing much faster than supply due in large part to the power of modern digital media channels to reverb idealistic and anti-idealistic content on the extremes of consumer culture.

Regenerative organic acreage is now estimated at only 700,000 acres in the U.S., or 13% of the USDA-certified organic acreage (numbers courtesy of Regenerative Farmers of America and the USDA). Supply is nanoscopic in the U.S. In fact, more than 80% of regenerative acreage is international at this point.

Regulatory intervention would accelerate adoption of regenerative agriculture the fastest and reduce prices to middle-class levels. Dueling certifications confuse and undermine the growth of the attribute itself. It’s like dueling denominations of Christianity. This kind of disagreement will go forever in the nonprofit sector unless the government steps in to supercede and end it, more or less.

The more significant problem than dueling certifications is that ROC foods at premium or super-premium prices will cater to an elite who will insist that the products perform vastly better than premium equivalents in everyday usage.

In other words, the same audience able to pay and ideologically primed to adopt the regenerative food standard overlaps with the group that will hold these branded products to a higher sensory standard.

This is what we might call the “sensory tax” in premium CPG. It is an artifact of how cultural elites adopt new brands. And It isn’t kind to new brands and product lines. Some of the few products I’ve tried that have paid this “sensory tax” and will do well include –

Force of Nature beef

New Barn Organics eggs, specifically

Dr. Bronner’s liquid soaps

What ROC lacks that “organic” had in the 2000s is the element of fear.

Organic took off due to ferocious word-of-mouth among Whole Foods Moms who were pregnant and terrified of what bovine growth hormones (introduced to the U.S. milk supply in 2015) might do to their fetuses, babies, and children. That is a very ancient fear – harm to my children. It is highly memorable and highly motivating as I found out doing fieldwork in the homes of Whole Foods’ Moms.

Saving the earth from the ravages of climate change may be necessary to some of us, but it is not the same kind of fear that Whole Foods Moms had come into those stores in the 2000s, racing for organic milk. I was there documenting these folks.

ROC might need to find a “fear” to tap into that is more immediate than global warming. I just do not know what this would be. Or maybe Gen Z is climate-change primed enough to feel this one long-term fear in ways older generations do not (and can not if they likely to die long before global warm devastates modern lifeways).

Or, regenerative agriculture could play on an ancient logic mainly relevant a specific lifestyle group around the world. This ancient logic is the logic of transactional reciprocity that tends to bind families together in the pre-modern world. I do X for you and then you must do Y whenever I ask for it later. 

The folks who look at nature immersion as their secular religion are most likely to be primed through marketing to see their access to the natural world as a debt incurred that can be repaid through eating that does not wound mother nature. 

Is nature worship, not climate fear, the way to sell this new standard of purity?