Feb 16 • Producer to Producer [Farmers]
Fight against the deathstar…
Here’s the thing.
A lot of organic farmers and organic organisations feel threatened by “regenerative ag”.
I get it … regen is often poorly defined, unevenly enforced, and sometimes used as a marketing shortcut for what organics has been building (and proving) for years.
But turning it into a tribal war hurts all of us.
Because while we argue about labels, the reality of who controls acres, revenue, and risk protection keeps rolling on:
Very large farms (5,000+ acres)
- 1.4% of farms (27,034 of 1,900,487)
- control 41.8% of farmland acres (367.7M of 880.1M)
- capture roughly ~35% of revenue
- and roughly ~35% of insurance/handouts
So if we’re serious about shifting agriculture at scale, we don’t win by fragmenting into camps. We win by building shared standards, shared measurement, and shared market pull.
Scale check (this is the bit that should humble all of us)
Organic (USA):
- ~3.8M harvested organic cropland acres
- ~8.7M total organic acres (including pasture)That’s still about ~1% of total farmland (and it’s even less if you only count harvested cropland).
Regenerative:
- “Regen acres” is messy because the definition is messy.
- Best estimate you’ve cited: ~25M acres third-party certified regenerative in the US.
Practice-based “regen-ish” cropping acres (not certification):
- No-till cropland: ~105M acres (2022)
- Cover crops: ~18M acres (2022)
The common ground (where we should link arms)
Organic and regenerative overlap heavily on:
- soil function and biology
- reduced dependency on fragile input chains
- resilience in drought/flood/weather volatility
- better water outcomes
- stronger long-term farm economics
A useful line to hold
Organic is a standard. Regenerative is a direction.
We need both: a credible floor and a scalable path forward.
If we can stop policing the tribe and start aligning incentives, we can turn “regen vs organic” into the only argument that matters:
how quickly can we move acres toward measurable outcomes, and get farmers paid fairly for it?
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Fight against the deathstar…
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