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Earlier this month, Regrow brought together 50 leaders from across the Midwest and Great Plains grains system: farmers, CPGs, retailers, advisors, lenders, insurers, philanthropy, and policy. We convened this diverse group because we see that achieving landscape-scale transition in a commodity grain system will require far greater coordination, connectivity, and collaboration across organizations, projects, and sectors than currently exists today. No single program or actor can shift the system alone.
reNourish Studio collaborated with Regrow to design and facilitate this innovative working session. What made the gathering particularly unique was the opportunity for actors across finance, supply chains, agronomy, insurance, policy, and farming, and in similar grains systems, to openly workshop shared challenges. Participants engaged in deep, intentional problem solving throughout the two days, leaning into difficult conversations with honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to grapple with the complexity of systemic change. Attendees expressed how valuable and energizing it was to step outside their usual silos and think collaboratively about the future of the regional grain system.
Over two days, participants explored where regional collaboration could help accelerate regenerative agriculture adoption in the Midwest and Northern Great Plains. We asked difficult questions and required honest responses. Where are regenerative programs in this specific region working today, and why? Where are they breaking down? What are the biggest opportunities for us to unlock momentum and capital, and who needs to be involved in doing that? What would it actually take to move the needle on regenerative practice adoption and system-level resilience?
1. Data helps us translate local wins into smarter regional strategies.
Regrow data shows that, across the roughly 150 million acres in the Midwest grains region, regenerative adoption is trending backward. Conservation tillage has lost about 10% of its footprint since 2018. Cover crops are stuck near 7% of acres. Crop diversity is narrowing as corn-soy rotations continue to dominate.
These numbers are motivating for action, and the data itself helps us identify paths forward. Despite this backward regional trend, there are examples of specific regions and programs making important strides. A North Dakota landscape collaboration grew from 20,000 acres in year one to 300,000 by year three. Many regional pilots are succeeding. But local wins don’t show up at the system level without a way to measure, compare, and connect them. That’s the role data has to play: not only for compliance reporting, but as connective tissue, helping program designers see what’s durable, where practice retention is fragile, and where the next dollar will go furthest.
Data can help reveal where regenerative practices are taking hold, where retention is fragile, and what local agronomic, economic, or program design factors may be shaping outcomes. Used well, it’s a tool to help program designers understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions, so regional strategies are grounded in local nuance rather than models from other programs or isolated pilots.
2. New markets are the missing infrastructure for crop diversification
Producers know how to grow more diverse rotations, including small grains, cover crops, and forage systems. However, 60% of farmland acres in the region are still locked into corn-soy rotations.
That's because commodity infrastructure (elevators, price signals, crop insurance, processing capacity, and contract norms) has been built around these two crops. Everything else asks farmers to absorb more risk, more logistics complexity, and more uncertainty around where and how their harvest will be sold. That system doesn’t shift easily without coordinated intervention.
This room grappled with one key lever to unlocking diversification: building stronger and more flexible market demand with the same intentionality that built today’s commodity system. Stable demand signals from CPGs, retailers, food manufacturers, feed markets, and emerging bio-based industries can help make diversified rotations economically viable. But participants also emphasized that diversification will require multiple pathways for producers to sell crops, not just a single end market with narrow specifications.
The conversation also highlighted the importance of broader producer de-risking mechanisms: aggregation infrastructure, shared investment, technical assistance, crop insurance reform, and multi-year commitments that help farmers manage uncertainty during transition periods. Without coordinated market development and systems designed to absorb risk across the value chain, the potential for large-scale diversification will remain difficult to realize.
3. Commodity agriculture requires different partnership models
Many sustainability and sourcing frameworks were designed for branded consumer industries like packaged food, apparel, or personal care, where individual companies have strong influence over their supply chains, differentiated products, and direct relationships with consumers. Those models don’t transfer cleanly to bulk commodities like grains.
In the grain system, even major CPGs are relatively small players compared to the scale of the overall market. As one participant put it, they are “teeny tiny” in the grain world. No single buyer can move the system on its own, and no single funder can underwrite the transition.
That reality points to the need for partnership models specifically designed for commodity agriculture: shared investment structures, coordinated demand signals, regional infrastructure, and collaborative approaches that spread both risk and responsibility across the value chain.
The model that kept surfacing in St. Louis was one of shared risk and shared funding across CPGs, retailers, input providers, insurers, lenders, philanthropy, and local government. This collaboration needs to be anchored by supply-shed coordination more than vertical supply chains. The most promising near-term mechanism might be a transition-risk product: gap insurance or a shared-loss structure that makes the first three to five years of a regenerative transition financeable for the mid-scale farmers who are falling through existing policies.
We don’t have a finished answer there. But the room agreed on the shape of it, and that is new in itself.
What’s next
In the coming weeks, participants will continue carrying forward the insights, relationships, and emerging opportunities for collaboration that surfaced in St. Louis. We’ll continue supporting connections across working groups and sharing key learnings that emerged from the gathering.
And of course, this work goes beyond grains. We’re working to build resilience across our shared food system, in regions beyond the US and in crops beyond grains. We hope you’ll use these learnings as a springboard for conversations among your own stakeholders, in your own crops and regions.
If you’re working on any of these problems — building data infrastructure that supports practice durability, quantifying supply-shed risk, or designing the transition-risk products this system needs — we’d love to compare notes.
