Regen Ag has Hit its Ms. Make-it-Repeatable Phase

In Jason Lemkin's classic "4 Types of VP of Sales," the SaaStr founder outlines the typical arc of category development, arguing that every successful category goes through the same phases. In the beginning, growth depends on evangelists: people who can sell a new idea before there is a proven playbook. They convince early adopters to take a chance on something unfamiliar and help create a market where none existed before.

But eventually the question changes from viability to repeatability: can this new idea work again and again, across different customers, teams, budgets, and business conditions? That's where "Ms. Make-it-Repeatable" comes in. In Lemkin's framework, this is the leader who takes a company from its first traction to real scale, figuring out how to sell the same thing to different buyers, with different rationales, at different price points. Only after that come the phases of rapid expansion and optimization.

All of us working to build sustainable agriculture as a category through regenerative farming have now entered the Make-it-Repeatable phase. And we have to be honest with ourselves: we are not great at it yet. Why is that?

Our regenerative program buyer isn’t a person. It’s a group of people.

Over the last month I’ve had several candid, face-to-face conversations with leaders across the regen ag community, from St. Louis to Minneapolis, Amsterdam and beyond. The most consistent message I heard was a version of the same struggle: we set big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs, to quote famous management thinkers Jim Collins and Jerry Porras) to get leadership attention. And it worked! But now we’ve run headlong into the harder part: delivering. 

The budgets aren't pre-approved. We’re debating them with CFOs, line by line, and every investment has to prove its value beyond sustainability alone. Today, the regenerative program buyer is not a person; it’s a group. Like in all mature categories, what used to be a single sustainability leader is now a buying committee including finance, procurement, ops, marketing, and supply chain teams; each with a different lens, a different threshold for cost and a different extent of involvement. Ideally, the buying-committee dynamic forces sustainability to become a critical business function, governed with the same rigor as financial performance and financial risk.

This model ensures lasting change by bringing ideas outside of a single person’s influence and into greater business strategy. Consider this: the next program in the same company might be run by someone new who is learning from a pilot a colleague started three years ago. We need systems to apply learnings from one program to the next, identify trends over years and adapt programs without reinventing the wheel. That’s where the buyer group can excel… though it does make investment more challenging to secure.

On top of this difficulty, there’s an undercurrent of urgency that none of us wanted to admit. In some US geographies, regen adoption isn't just plateauing — it's reversing. Our own satellite data, which the Regrow team reviewed prior to a Grains event co-hosted with reNourish, shows several corn-belt counties moving backwards on regenerative practice adoption year-on-year. The regen ag leaders that attended our Grains event expected to see slow growth, but our data showed retreat. This shows us that we don’t have the luxury of sitting back; we need to continue evolving with the category.

Here is what the Make-it-Repeatable challenge looks like in practice:

• Coalitions are needed to cover start-up costs.
  Regen programs are expensive to stand up, and the only sensible way for a food or beverage company to begin one is at small committed volumes. Small volumes and high fixed costs is a bad unit economy — which is why CFOs tell their teams to look for partners. The coalition logic is simple: pool the demand, share the cost of approaching farmers, work on claims together, and nobody is the only one writing down the spend in isolation.
  
  Of course, the politics of coalitions are still brutal. Legal departments are nervous about antitrust, competitive instinct cuts against pre-competitive ambition, and almost everyone is privately running their own pilot while publicly calling for collaboration. "Pilot fatigue" is something everyone in the industry feels, and while we feel the need to evolve, it’s easier said than done. I include Regrow in this responsibility. We commit to helping our community find allies across the rotation to invest in programs together with, and pool budgets with.
  
  
• Consumer monetization has lost strength as the economy has changed.  Consumers were more willing to pay for regenerative ag in a pre-inflation, pre-tariff world. Brands have already raised prices to absorb cost shocks, and consumers are looking for more value, not more premiums. The K-shaped economy splits this into two parents in the same aisle with very different price tolerances, and brands are trying to land both at once. The latitude for marketing regenerative ag also differs across brands: the brands that have been telling a farm-story for years can fold in a regenerative or local-sourcing message and it feels native. The brands that haven't can't. Abstract language does not resonate with consumers. What does: what is good for me; what I can see in the place I live; biodiversity in my region; the soil under the wheat in my bread. The premium price of sustainability can’t be transferred to consumers in the same way it once was.
  
  
• The word "sustainability" is becoming a liability and "regenerative" may be next. In consumer research shared at some of this month’s events, "regenerative" did not crack the top tier of company priorities — well behind plastics, food waste, water, and climate. We need to own this. We — myself included — built and leaned on this vocabulary over the last decade. We built it for ourselves, to get on the same page about the myriad of practices that regenerative movement encompasses. However, this vocabulary is not  clear to the consumer or the program sponsor. The CFO speaks in supply security, risk-adjusted return, license to operate. The consumer speaks in price, taste, and trust. The Evangelist's vocabulary doesn't translate during the Make it Repeatable phase.
  
  
• Scope 3 is sliding down the priority stack, and that has quietly changed why on-farm work survives at all. Inside many CPGs, sustainability isn't the top priority anymore. Tariff management and EPR packaging compliance have absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars; climate goals and Scope 3 management have dropped down the list. That’s why we have to change how we quantify the business case for investment. Today we must talk about assured supply, supplier relationships, regulatory standing and farmer wellbeing rather than emissions deltas.
  
  
• Capital is the bottleneck, not awareness, interest or data. This was the most under-discussed truth I saw this month, and the one that platforms, consultancies and NGOs have most consistently seen. CPG sustainability budgets are tapped out. The only new programs being discussed are the ones that can stack additional financing — blended capital, lender discounts, public co-funding, outcome-based payments — alongside CPG dollars. Meanwhile on the farm side, input costs for diesel and fertilizer are punishingly high, which means farmers are more open to practices that build on-farm fertility and reduce input dependence. Farmers are willing to adopt new practices, but we’re lacking resources like technical advisory and risk-bearing capital to carry farmers through their transition years. In the US, federal conservation technical assistance is being cut while demand is rising. In Europe, the Common Ag Policy is reaching for outcome-based payments without the measurement plumbing to enforce them. On both sides of the Atlantic, regen ag leaders are trying to balance capital, demand and market readiness, but we haven’t yet seen the scales even out.
  
  
• Carbon was the first repeatable sale. Water and biodiversity may be next.
  Carbon won because CFOs can measure progress and translate it into a line item. Water and biodiversity remain measurement deserts; a key supply-chain water working group launched only in the last few weeks, indicating where the status of those metrics is today. The question for the next twenty-four months: can the same financial machinery that turned carbon into language scale to water, and to nature? If yes, integrated nature-positive accounting is possible by the end of the decade. If not, if we fail to attract the new types of capital that would be interested to invest in water and biodiversity outcomes, and limit ourselves to pilots with narrative claims, we'll push back the progress on this space even further out. That is also on us.

These are some of the hallmark changes I’ve seen as the category has moved from Evangelist to Ms. Make-it-Repeatable. 

What is the hallmark of this phase in our movement?

It isn't optimism or despair; it is the seriousness of a category growing up.

Over the last decade, we proved a remarkable amount. Farmers are willing to adopt new practices. Buyers are willing to invest. Governments can play a constructive role. Capital can be mobilized. Measurement systems can be built. Ten years ago, none of those outcomes were guaranteed.

The challenge now is different. We are no longer asking whether regenerative agriculture can work; we are asking how to make it work consistently, at scale, and under real-world business constraints.

That is why I’ve left recent conferences encouraged, even though many of the conversations were difficult. Alongside all the discussion of budget pressure, shifting priorities, and adoption challenges, I’ve noticed that the industry is asking more sophisticated questions than it was five years ago. The conversation has moved from awareness to execution. We’ve developed solid operating models and we’re starting to work towards efficiency and scale.

Unlike previous chapters of this story, we do not have to rely on assumptions about what is working; we’re beginning to see it in real time, because we’ve come to know what it looks like when something works.

Using satellite imagery and other measurement tools, we can observe whether practices are being adopted, maintained, or abandoned. We can identify where investments are creating lasting change and where they are falling short. We can learn faster than previous generations of agricultural transitions ever could.

That may be the most important reason for optimism.

The Evangelist phase rewarded vision, ambition, and bold commitments. This next phase rewards learning, iteration, and course adjustments where necessary.

Sometimes I need to remind myself that the goal was never to build a movement. The goal is to change outcomes on the ground, and that requires growth and maturity across the sector.

That is the work ahead. And for the first time, we have the tools to see whether we are succeeding.

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Written after attending Innovation Forum Amsterdam and Innovation Forum Minneapolis.
No attribution, Chatham House rule. The referenced SaaStr framework is by Jason Lemkin.

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