Danone’s Cost Plus Model program contracts are typically five years or longer. That allows the farmers to get out of a ‘next quarter, next year’ discussion and get into a ‘next decade, next generation’ discussion. It allows them to look deeper at how their own activities can impact GHGs and move more toward a regenerative model.

When it comes to carbon neutrality and reducing greenhouse gases, grass-based dairy farming is nature’s original and best way to capture carbon and improve soil fertility and water quality. My whole mission as a cheesemonger has been to try to be a cheerleader for supporting this kind of agriculture. It just so happens that making cheese is the way that the farms we work with have decided to attack this question and participate in a regenerative economy.

– Anne Saxelby, Founder, Saxelby Cheesemongers

We focus on creating new relationships between farmers and brands, bundling up a variety of strategies to help that relationship evolve, from strategy in the approach to piloting, as well as qualitative and quantitative metrics of success so that brands can go to market with a powerful story. And the farmer can be financially compensated to reflect the ecological investments they’ve been making in creating public good for all of us.

Everything that we do in this space needs to drive action and outcomes. Outcomes like carbon reduction, carbon sequestration, water-related outcomes, and equally important the economic piece of it. It has to make financial, economic sense for the farmer as well. Everything that we do really needs to be about meeting the farmer where they are and doing things that work for the farmer at the local level.

When you invest in regenerative systems, there’s a strong economic case for farmers. We just did a two-year study with the Soil Health Institute looking at the economics of soil health management systems with a hundred farmers in nine states in the corn belt. We found that 97% of them felt like they were more resilient than the previous system. 67% of them had yield improvements which lead to lower costs.

Ethical sourcing is doing the right thing for the consumer by bringing products of integrity, made of nutrient-dense ingredients to market. From the farmer’s perspective, it’s creating demand for all the different crops that crop rotation and a regenerative environment creates.

Within that regenerative program, quinoa gets rotationally cropped with Lupini beans. So we have to create a market for Lupini beans, we have to provide and guarantee that market for farmers to engage in the regenerative organic program.

One of our farmers in Uganda has been growing a food forest, not because it’s hip and regenerative agriculture is “in”, but because it makes sense for his business in terms of improving soil health, product diversification and generating multiple revenue streams. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about a lot is how can we as a business innovate with impact in mind rather than trendy terms or ingredients.

We’ve created local supply chains that operate in their own concert. Seal the Seasons has a branded end product featuring the farmer on the front. It tells you exactly where that farm is. Ultimately what we want to do is open up the market for value-added produce so that brands can pick the best fruit for their value-added products. We really see that as being a huge opportunity to expand regenerative family farm produce.

Regeneration to me is the concept of land revitalization. It’s not just thinking about farmland differently from an “inputs and an outcomes” perspective, but thinking about the communities that are around that farmland and bringing, not just biological diversity, but economic and social outcomes. What kind of on-farm, value-added activities need to happen to make sure we’re breaking the commodity cycle?

If we’re shifting into the paradigm of regenerative, it’s a much more receptive type of action. It’s a process that involves a lot of listening. It’s a process that involves a lot of sensitivity to the ecosystem, to the people, to the place. Ultimately I think what we’re exploring with the regenerative paradigm of business and sourcing is ‘how are we uplifting and creating potential within communities and within ecosystems?

There’s lots of great ideas out there, for instance – carbon negative, but that might only make sense for a certain area. You don’t want be shipping that across the world because then it loses all the viability of that regenerative system. By investing in something that’s local, you can attach your company to that ecosystem or that community. If the inputs are sourced locally, you can actually make an impact. For a lot of packaging right now, we don’t know where any of those inputs are coming from and that’s concerning for many reasons.

I think ‘scale’ has to be rethought. I don’t like to use the term recycling because a bag of chips is never gonna become another bag of chips. It’s gonna become a dog Frisbee or a deck board. It’s not circular. If I took a handful of glitter and blew it all over, and asked you nicely, ‘Can you pick up all those pieces and bring them back to me?’ How much of that would I get back? That’s entropy, that’s the current problem, and you don’t solve entropy with more entropy. You have to be able to do things efficiently on a smaller scale.