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Most companies funding regenerative agriculture programs are asking some version of the same question right now: are these investments reducing our exposure to climate risk? Is building soil health also building measurably more resilient agricultural supply chains?
A growing body of evidence broadly shows the answer is “yes,” including a recent analysis conducted by Regrow’s own geospatial and agronomic experts detailed below.
Yet most corporate sustainability teams still can't justify regen ag investment in their unique sourcing footprint, and in the ways that resonate with finance and procurement: risk reduction and supply assurance.
We’re working to close that gap, bringing data, science and a methodology that scales. But we can’t do it alone. We’re looking for partners who want to be a part of this journey to build the kind of proof that moves real transition capital toward the fields that need it most.
Signals of resilience from regenerative fields
Let’s take a look at a recent example of our work in action, including the promising results and legitimate limitations.
We analyzed anonymized farmer-reported yield data across Regrow wheat MRV programs and asked a crucial question: do regenerative fields produce steadier, more consistent yields than conventional ones?
The answer is yes, and the difference is significant.
In our global dataset, we found that field-level yield variability falls from 34.0% on conventional fields to 17.2% on those with sustained adoption of both cover cropping and no-till.
For companies sourcing from these fields, and the farmers working them, that's a more predictable field to plan around, year to year, with fewer surprises in what actually shows up at harvest.
We saw this as a promising case for the yield impact of regenerative practices in wheat, and the logical next step was to drill in on one key sourcing region. We chose to focus our analysis on Kansas, the largest wheat producing state in the US, and one faced with increasingly common drought conditions. Do regen ag fields produce steadier yields specifically when under stress? This is the downside protection question so critical to justifying budgets.
To answer that, we isolated drought years specifically, by region and by adoption level. We built a predictive model to support this analysis, layering drought indices and our MonitorML remote sensing on top of field-level yield estimates.
Early results were promising: many counties showed steadier yields for long-term regenerative fields than their conventional counterparts when faced with severe drought conditions. The results varied and more years of ground-truth data are still needed to train a generalized model that would be applicable across a broad range of sourcing regions and climate perils. The temporal aspect is especially important given that the biggest yield stabilization benefits are often seen on fields with 8+ years of continued adoption.
What’s next, and how we can scale together
We view these as exciting signals, built on a scientifically sound methodology. But to justify and unlock program budgets at scale, organizations need to be able to run these analyses wherever it matters in their supply chain. That's only possible with more partners bringing training data to the table, and on that front there’s good news and bad news.
The good news: this data already exists!
The bad: it’s scattered across the industry between growers, insurers and lenders, research institutions, MRV providers and more.
We believe a coalition of committed partners could bring the entire industry closer to quantifying the climate risk impact of regenerative practices at scale, and today we're hoping to find out who else wants to be part of this work.
We're not asking anyone to hand their data to any one company. We're proposing to work with a non-profit partner to bring this data together at an aggregate, anonymized level, one that protects the farmers behind it. We’re also looking for organizations that hold yield data, price agricultural risk, run long-term agronomic trials, or work on problems like this one. We want to hear from you.
We've put together a short form below so interested parties can tell us who they are, what they'd bring, and what questions they have. We look forward to hearing from you, and working together to solve this industry-defining challenge.
