After decades of field trials and innovation, regenerative agriculture has emerged as a model capable of delivering environmental, social, and economic gains. What it hasn’t yet delivered is scale – covering only 1.5 per cent of global farmland.
Why, then, has regenerative agriculture struggled to move beyond the margins? And what would it take for regeneration to become the norm rather than the exception?
These questions were at the centre of a recent webinar hosted by Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value (BSV), Scaling Regenerative Forms of Agriculture: Exploring Different “Meanings” and “Mechanisms” of Re-organization. Part of the Centre’s “Future of Agri-food” series, the event brought together leading international voices from farming, procurement, finance, and digital infrastructure to examine the structural barriers limiting adoption and how to overcome them.
Rather than offering a single solution, the conversation surfaced a set of complementary insights. Across geographies and sectors, speakers emphasized that scaling regenerative agriculture is not simply about farming more land differently, but about redesigning the systems around it so regeneration can take hold and endure.
What follows are five lessons from the discussion on how to do just that.
Align around shared principles, not uniform practices
Speaking from southern Spain, Yanniek Schoonhoven introduced the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA), a European farmer-led network on whose board she serves. For EARA, scaling regenerative agriculture is not about enforcing uniform practices, but aligning diverse approaches around shared principles, outcomes, and trust.
That alignment, Yanniek explained, is made possible through strategic governance.
EARA is intentionally farmer-led, with farmers themselves making the decisions – those who share a common purpose and the greatest stake in long-term outcomes.
While united by a shared agricultural identity, EARA’s members operate across vastly different landscapes and growing conditions throughout Europe.
“What we do here in the south of Spain in a very dry area is very different from what a farmer has to do in the Netherlands in a wetland system, for example,” Yanniek said.
That diversity is central to EARA’s approach. Rather than standardizing practices, its model supports information sharing and adaptation, allowing regenerative principles to take shape differently across regions and landscapes toward comparable ecological and social outcomes.
Invest in capacity and relationships before growth
From Brazil, Rodrigo César Paes Barroso, Community Leader of the Grupo Associado de Agricultura Sustentável (GAAS), described a farmer-led movement born out of necessity.
A decade ago, Brazilian commodity farmers faced rising input costs and shrinking margins, with little guidance on how to respond. Rather than waiting for external solutions, they experimented collectively with regenerative practices. Today, that effort has since grown from one farm into a network covering more than 1.5 million hectares.
For Barroso, however, scale is not measured in land area alone.
“For us, it’s actually more important to build a strong basis in terms of building capacity to be able to modify relations,” he explained, citing relationships between farmers and the land, among peers, and across the supply chain. Only by reshaping those relationships, he argued, can farmers move “from survival mode to prosperity mode.”
But that evolution took time. Barroso described GAAS as a social organism.
“Organizations are social bodies… that go through phases of development, just like a person,” he said.
Trust came first, followed by structure. Scale followed only after.
Design supply chains for resilience, not simplicity
Providing a different lens, Carolina Iatesta Domenico, Product Manager at Natura, shared that companies can help scale regenerative agriculture through how they source and buy products. Brazil’s largest cosmetics multinational, Natura has spent more than 25 years building biodiversity-based supply chains across Latin America, working with 52 communities and more than 12,000 families.
For Domenico, scaling regenerative agriculture is a function of how companies manage relationships with communities, not individual producers.
“Sometimes the time of business is not the time of biodiversity,” she said, pointing to the need for dedicated teams to bridge cultural, ecological, and commercial realities between a global enterprise and local communities of producers deeply embedded in the “place”. At Natura, a specialized group focuses solely on community relationships, enabling context-specific contracts that support fair pricing, quality, and long-term supply.
Partnership is therefore essential.
“We don’t do anything alone. We need partners,” Domenico said, highlighting the networks that allow Natura to operate at scale. Rather than simplifying supply chains, the company invests in the complexity required to sustain regeneration.
Redesign the systems around farmers
Max Cooper, Chief Development Officer from Producers Trust, a tech-powered landscape platform, pushed the conversation further down the systems lens.
“Regenerative agriculture doesn’t fail due to lack of agronomy, or lack of capital” he argued. “It fails because the systems around farmers are not designed well to support them.”
Traditional linear supply chains, Cooper explained, push volatility and compliance risk upstream, leaving farmers with few (if any) tools to absorb shocks. In contrast, Producers Trust designs systems where buyers, financiers, and governments share responsibility, making farmers full economic partners.
For Cooper, scaling is not about multiplying pilots, it’s about effective coordination at regional scale and “repeatable conditions at a network level.”
Shared data, long-term purchasing agreements, and clear metrics reduce uncertainty, making regenerative agriculture more attractive to investors and easier to scale.
Update financial systems to recognize resilience
Tina Owens, Lead of Regenerative Agriculture Systems and Investments at Transformational Investing in Food Systems, closed the panel by addressing one of the most persistent barriers to scaling regenerative agriculture: finance.
While evidence shows regenerative forms of agriculture improve yield resilience at a reduced ecological and social cost, she argued markets still lack the data needed to reflect that reality. As a result, insurance, lending, and investment systems rely on outdated risk models that no longer match on-the-ground realities.
To illustrate the disconnect, she offered a striking comparison: the health costs of smoking.
“Actuarial data on a former practice, being cover crops… is similar to a reduction in risk as the difference between covering a smoker or a non-smoker from a health insurance perspective.” Yet financial models, she emphasized, have not caught up, leaving that value unpriced – and underscoring the need for more structured data and frameworks to account for resilience in decision-making
Without this alignment, regeneration remains under-resourced, with farmers carrying investment costs at a disproportionately high financing rate. With it, they become investable.
From individual efforts to collective action
While the panel brought together diverse voices, one clear theme emerged: scaling regenerative agriculture is not solely a technical challenge, but a collective one – dependent on shared learning, coordinated systems, and cross-sector trust.
That insight extended beyond the webinar and into a broader Lighthouse convening hosted by Ivey’s BSV. Anchored in the Centre’s Collective Action Program for Regenerative Agriculture and Systems Transformation Pathways Initiative, the event focused on building communities of practice through shared learning and information exchange among farmers, agri-food companies, policy-makers, Indigenous partners, and sustainability organizations operating in the same region.
As the panel moderator and faculty lead for both initiatives, Jury Gualandris, endowed Abell-Hodgson Chair in Regenerative Agriculture and BSV Academic Director, closed the day by returning to the question at its core: what does it really mean to scale regenerative agriculture?
Rather than focusing on expansion alone, he urged participants to think differently about scale, by helping farmers and organizations “scale deep in their region.” By building the relationships, infrastructure, and collective intelligence needed to solve local problems first, regenerative agriculture, he suggested, can grow outward without losing what makes it work in the first place: its contextual, adaptive, and resilient character that serves people and the planet together.
Watch the full webinar, Scaling Regenerative Forms of Agriculture: Exploring Different “Meanings” and “Mechanisms” of Re-organization on Ivey’s YouTube channel.
