Regenerative Agriculture at COP30

If you were paying attention during Climate Week in New York City this past September, you might have noticed something striking. Among more than 900 events across the city, regenerative agriculture claimed about 100 of them. That is roughly 11 percent of all programming, making it one of the five most discussed topics of the week. Major corporations like Walmart, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Amazon were hosting sessions. The Rockefeller Foundation announced $100 million to provide regeneratively-sourced school meals to 100 million children worldwide. There was even an entire venue called RegenHouse that featured 56 sessions just on regenerative food systems.

The momentum felt real. Reports indicated greater numbers of smallholders in the Global South and small to mid-size family farms in the Global North are transitioning to regenerative. Governments were making joint statements. Corporate commitments were pouring in. Technology solutions were being unveiled. It seemed like regenerative agriculture had finally made the leap from niche methodology to mainstream climate strategy. Then came COP30.

Setting the Stage in Belém

For those unfamiliar with the acronym, COP stands for Conference of the Parties, which is the annual United Nations climate change conference where countries gather to negotiate global responses to the climate crisis. This year's conference, COP30, is taking place in Belém, Brazil—a coastal city known as the gateway to the Amazon River. Taking place from November 10 to 21, this is the 30th such gathering and Brazil has positioned it as a conference focused on implementation rather than just pledges. Agriculture is objective number three on the agenda, and regenerative agriculture features prominently in their plans.

On paper, COP30 should be the perfect stage for regenerative agriculture to shine. Brazil is launching something called the RAIZ Initiative, which stands for Resilient Agriculture Investment for Net Zero Land Degradation. It is an ambitious global effort to accelerate investments in restoring degraded agricultural lands, with a goal of restoring 1.5 billion hectares by 2030. Earlier this year, Brazil mobilized $6 billion to restore 3 million hectares of degraded pastureland. Companies like Syngenta are announcing programs to recover 1 million hectares in the Cerrado region. PepsiCo partnered with other companies to support regenerative practices on thousands of acres of Brazilian farmland.

The corporate playbook from Climate Week appears to be getting deployed in Brazil. There are panels at something called the Agrizone Pavilion, with sponsors like Nestlé and Bayer. There are 27 sessions focused specifically on regenerative agriculture. The language is familiar: systems thinking, measurable outcomes, profitability for farmers, supply chain resilience.

Two Summits, Two Worldviews

Here is where things get complicated.

While the official COP30 proceedings celebrate regenerative agriculture as a climate solution, there is a parallel event happening just a few miles away. It is called the People's Summit, and is expected to draw participants from social movements, Indigenous groups, traditional communities, and grassroots organizations. They are gathering specifically to present an alternative vision to what they see happening at the official conference. In fairness, it should also be noted that the Brazilian government has taken steps to include local voices at COP30 itself, including the participation of a record-breaking 3,000 Indigenous peoples.

The People's Summit is focused on agroecology and food sovereignty, demanding land demarcation for Indigenous peoples and promoting what they call "living territories" in direct opposition to what they characterize as predatory agribusiness. They are emphasizing family farmers, peasant production, and Indigenous food systems as the real path to climate-resilient agriculture.

If you are wondering why the People's Summit uses the term "agroecology" while those taking part in the official COP30 talk about "regenerative agriculture," you are asking the right question. In terms of actual farming practices and environmental outcomes, the two approaches are roughly analogous. Both emphasize building soil health, enhancing biodiversity, eliminating chemical inputs, and creating more resilient farming systems. Both focus on working with natural processes rather than against them. And if you were to visit two farms, one agroecological and one regenerative, the practices followed would be almost identical.

But what unites both approaches is something more fundamental: a shared view that agricultural transformation must be approached holistically. Both agroecology and regenerative agriculture reject the notion that environmental, economic, and social outcomes can be addressed separately or sequentially. Instead, they understand that meaningful agricultural transformation requires these dimensions to be addressed simultaneously. Healthy soil, biological diversity, profitable farmers, and resilient communities are not separate goals but interconnected outcomes that must develop together.

Where they diverge is in the details regarding how this holistic transformation happens. Agroecology emerged from social movements in Latin America and explicitly connects farming practices to broader questions of social justice, land rights, food sovereignty, and challenging corporate control of food systems. The People's Summit's focus on agroecology reflects this orientation, linking agricultural transformation to demands for land demarcation, territorial rights, and fundamentally restructuring power relations in food systems.

Regenerative agriculture also emphasizes social outcomes like community wellbeing, farmer profitability, and improved livelihoods, but tends to see these benefits as intrinsic to the farming methodology rather than relying to a large extent on external structural or political changes. This makes regenerative agriculture more accessible to corporations and mainstream institutions, which can adopt the framework and pursue its social benefits without necessarily aligning with a particular political agenda or challenging existing ownership patterns and power structures… even if they do indeed need to change in many cases.

Because regenerative agriculture is still being actively defined without universal standards, there is an ongoing tension about whether its social dimensions will remain central or become diluted in favor of purely environmental and economic metrics. This distinction helps explain why there are two separate gatherings in Belém rather than one unified conversation about sustainable farming.

And skeptics are not alone in raising their concerns. While corporate leaders were preparing their regenerative agriculture presentations for COP30, more than 300 Indigenous people held a protest on the Tapajós River, intercepting soy barges and opposing the expansion of waterways and a proposed railway designed to make soy exports cheaper. One Indigenous leader put it bluntly: "It's a contradiction for the government to speak about climate commitments in Belém while fast-tracking a railway designed to make soy exports cheaper, expand ports, and further pressure our lands."

The timing reveals something important. Remember that sacred-centered worldview event during Climate Week, the one sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and Mad Agriculture that brought together Indigenous elders and wisdom keepers? The event that served as a counterpoint to all the corporate sessions about data and scalability and return on investment? That tension is not abstract anymore. It is playing out in real time in Brazil.

This sacred-centered approach offers another lens on the holistic transformation that both agroecology and regenerative agriculture are pursuing. Indigenous worldviews do not separate environmental health, economic wellbeing, and social relationships into distinct categories that must be balanced or integrated. Instead, they understand these as expressions of a single reality: the health of the whole system, including its spiritual dimensions. When Indigenous protesters demand land rights and decision-making power while corporate presentations focus on carbon metrics and supply chain resilience, they are revealing different understandings of what "holistic" actually means. One sees agriculture as embedded in sacred reciprocal relationships with land and community. The other sees holistic as meaning comprehensive, addressing multiple outcome categories simultaneously.

This deeper dimension of what constitutes holistic remains largely undefined in regenerative agriculture's emerging frameworks, even as agroecology has wrestled with it through decades of practice and reflection. Whether regenerative agriculture will embrace this more profound understanding of holistic transformation, or whether it will settle for a more technical definition of addressing multiple outcomes, remains one of the central questions at COP30.

Promises and Contradictions

Critics point out that the term "regenerative agriculture" still lacks universally accepted definitions or standards. During Climate Week, this flexibility was presented as a feature, not a bug, allowing adaptation to local conditions. But in Brazil, that same flexibility is being called out as greenwashing. Independent scientists are questioning whether soil carbon sequestration can actually offset the methane emissions from Brazil's 238 million head of cattle, despite what some corporate-sponsored research suggests. Brazil's methane footprint has risen 6 percent since 2020, and agriculture drove 74 percent of the country's total emissions in 2023.

There is also the uncomfortable fact that expansion of croplands and cattle operations has driven the significant loss of native vegetation in Brazil over the past six years. This is happening even as the country positions itself as a leader in regenerative agriculture.

The financial picture is equally revealing. While Climate Week emphasized that farmers need profitable pathways to transition to regenerative practices, and while billions are being invested by corporations in regenerative supply chains, only about 4 percent of climate finance is actually making it to solutions like restoring degraded land and agroforestry. The money isn't flowing where it needs to go.

At Climate Week, there was considerable discussion about how regenerative agriculture bridges the divide between Global North and South, engaging large-scale operations and smallholders equally. The Rockefeller Foundation's school meals program was held up as an example, taking inspiration from Brazil's national school feeding program where 30 percent of food is procured from family farms at premium prices.

But at COP30, that bridge looks more like a divide. The official proceedings feature corporate partnerships and technology-enabled monitoring systems. The People's Summit is focused on food sovereignty and territorial rights. An Indigenous chef named Tainá Marajoara is overseeing the COP30 kitchen, serving agroecological ingredients and calling it "an act of cultural and ancestral diplomacy." It's meaningful symbolism, but Indigenous protesters are being very clear that they need more than symbolic representation. They need land rights and actual decision-making power.

Brazil's Agriculture Minister Carlos Fávaro says the country demonstrates it is possible to "produce, conserve and include." But reports indicate the Brazilian government plans to resume the controversial Ferrogrão railway project immediately after COP30 wraps up, preparing for a 2026 concession auction and an international investor roadshow that will include stops in China. The railway is designed to make soy exports more efficient, which means more pressure on the very lands that regenerative agriculture is supposed to be restoring.

What Kind of Transformation

This does not mean the momentum from Climate Week was meaningless or that the corporate commitments are insincere. The technology breakthroughs in monitoring and verification are real. The financing mechanisms being developed are genuinely needed. The focus on farmer profitability addresses a critical barrier that previous environmental initiatives ignored.

But COP30 is revealing something that was easier to overlook during Climate Week: there are fundamentally different visions of what regenerative agriculture means and who it serves. One vision sees it as a way to make existing agricultural systems more sustainable while maintaining production growth and global commodity flows. Another vision sees it as inseparable from land reform, Indigenous rights, and a fundamental restructuring of food systems away from export-oriented agriculture toward local food sovereignty. These two visions are not mutually exclusive, but the precise area of overlap has yet to become clear.

During Climate Week, these tensions could coexist in the same city, even if they were in different conference rooms. At COP30, they are harder to ignore. The People's Summit is not just offering a different perspective. It is explicitly positioning itself as a counterpoint to what participants are calling "the agribusiness summit."

The question is not whether regenerative agriculture has momentum. Climate Week made that clear. The question is whether that momentum leads to the kind of transformation that actually addresses the climate crisis and supports the people who are most affected by it, or whether it becomes another way to greenwash business as usual with better marketing and more sophisticated monitoring systems.

As one climate researcher put it when discussing the scientific evidence, current food system trends present an "unacceptable risk" for staying within a livable climate. Absolutely huge reductions in livestock production would be required to align with the Paris Agreement, along with massive reductions in beef consumption. But the Brazilian Agribusiness Association's position paper for COP30 promotes the industry as a low-carbon agriculture leader without mentioning the need to reduce livestock at all.

The sacred-centered worldview that got a single event during Climate Week raises a fundamental question: can regenerative agriculture fulfill its potential while remaining embedded in extractive economic frameworks? Can you have truly regenerative systems when the underlying incentive structure still rewards extraction and export over restoration and local resilience?

The Implementation Test

COP30 is forcing these questions into the open. Brazil has positioned the conference as being about implementation rather than pledges, about moving from promise to practice. That focus on implementation is clarifying. It's one thing to announce commitments in New York City conference centers. It's another thing to implement them in the Cerrado, where corporate restoration programs and Indigenous land rights are colliding, where talk of carbon-neutral beef coexists with rising methane emissions and continued deforestation.

What happens over these two weeks in Belém matters. Not because COP30 will definitively answer these questions, but because it is making it harder to pretend they don't exist. The momentum from Climate Week is real, but so are the contradictions it is running into on the ground in Brazil.

17 November 2025

Who Gets to Define Regenerative Agriculture?
And Why It Matters More Than You Might Think

At Climate Week NYC this past September and continuing during this last week at COP30 in Brazil, there is one very large and looming issue that is getting scant attention. Lurking at the edge of the laudable surge of interest, support and commitments around regenerative agriculture is a fundamental question that threatens to undermine the entire movement: who gets to define what regenerative agriculture actually means?

This is not an academic debate. The answer to this question will determine whether regenerative agriculture fulfills its promise to transform our food system and address climate change, or whether it becomes just another marketing term emptied of meaning by the same forces it was meant to challenge.

The Place-Based Paradox

Any serious conversation about regenerative agriculture must start with the core principle that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What regenerates land in the temperate grasslands of Montana looks different from what works in the tropical forests of Costa Rica or the smallholder farms of Kenya. Context matters. Soil type, climate, water availability, cultural practices, and local ecosystems all shape what regenerative looks like on the ground.

This place-based approach is not optional. It is fundamental to the philosophy of regenerative agriculture. The whole point is to work with nature rather than imposing uniform industrial methods that ignore local conditions. Regenerative agriculture asks farmers to become students of their own land, to observe and adapt rather than follow a prescribed playbook.

But therein lies the paradox. This very flexibility creates confusion in the marketplace and opens the door to practices that may improve one metric while ignoring others. Without some shared understanding of what regenerative means, how do consumers know what they are buying? How do investors know what they are funding? How do we prevent the term from being stretched so thin it loses all meaning?

The Cherry-Picking Problem

We are already seeing this play out in troubling ways. Some large-scale operations are claiming the regenerative label while cherry-picking only the practices that fit within their existing industrial model.

Take the example of massive monoculture operations that plant thousands of acres of a single crop, add cover crops to the rotation, and then claim they are regenerative because their soil organic matter is improving. Yes, cover crops build soil health. But when these same operations continue to rely on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, when they grow genetically modified crops designed to withstand herbicide applications, when they operate at a scale that eliminates biodiversity rather than enhancing it, can we honestly call this regenerative?

Or consider the debate over GMOs. While they are explicitly banned under current regulations for certified organic produce, some farmers argue that because their soil tests show increased carbon sequestration, their use of herbicide-resistant crops should be considered regenerative. They point to reduced tillage and improved soil metrics. But this ignores a crucial reality that GMO crops are specifically designed to enable heavy chemical use. The most common genetically modified crops are engineered to survive applications of glyphosate and other herbicides that would kill conventional plants. The whole system depends on synthetic inputs.

This matters because allowing GMOs and heavy chemical dependency under the regenerative banner fundamentally contradicts what most serious practitioners and researchers understand regenerative agriculture to be about. It is not just about one metric like soil carbon. It is about building entire systems that regenerate rather than degrade.

Who Holds the Definitional Power?

So who gets to decide what counts as regenerative? Right now, multiple actors are competing for this authority, and the outcome is far from certain.

Government agencies are beginning to weigh in. California recently finalized a definition for state policies and programs after a two-year public process that included listening sessions and work groups. While this represents an attempt at democratic input, the resulting definition is intentionally broad, describing regenerative agriculture as a continuous journey rather than a fixed endpoint. Critics worry this vagueness will allow industrial operations to claim the label with minimal changes to their practices. Supporters argue it provides an entry point for thousands of farmers to begin improving their methods.

Similar efforts are underway in Europe. In June 2025, the European Economic and Social Committee became the first official EU body to explicitly recognize regenerative agriculture as a core strategy for transforming European food systems. Their definition describes it as "an adaptive, outcome-based farming approach applying practically proven and science-based methods with positive impacts on the environment, on farming communities' livelihoods and on public health." The European Academies Science Advisory Council has recommended that regenerative agriculture be prioritized by member states when implementing the region’s Common Agricultural Policy. Business coalitions are calling for EU-level outcome-based definitions with clear performance indicators. What is striking about these developments is that government bodies across different continents are gravitating toward similar language about outcomes and adaptability, while still wrestling with how specific or flexible the definitions should be.

A significant initiative launched at COP26 in 2021 aimed to address this definitional challenge. Regen10 (www.regen10.org) was formed with the explicit goal of putting farmers at the center of food systems transformation. One of its three core interventions was to "establish harmonized definitions, outcomes and metrics" for regenerative agriculture.

Yet four years later, Regen10 has published an outcomes-based framework rather than a clear definition. While the framework provides guidance on measuring environmental, social, and economic outcomes, it deliberately stops short of prescribing what practices constitute regenerative agriculture. This approach reflects a philosophical stance that regeneration should be defined by results rather than methods. But it also leaves a critical gap. Without some shared understanding of boundaries and non-negotiables, the term remains vulnerable to capture by those who would stretch it to fit practices that contradict its fundamental principles. The paradox deepens: the very effort designed to create alignment has reinforced the flexibility that enables definitional confusion.

Corporations are also shaping the definition through their purchasing commitments. When a major food company announces plans to source ingredients from millions of acres of "regenerative" farmland, the standards they set become de facto definitions with enormous market influence. Some of these corporate definitions are robust and demanding. Others seem designed primarily to allow existing suppliers to qualify with minimal disruption to current practices.

Meanwhile, farmer-led networks resist top-down definitions altogether. They argue that regenerative agriculture is fundamentally about observation, adaptation, and continuous improvement within local contexts. Trying to codify it into a checklist misses the point entirely.

Each of these approaches has merit. Each also has limitations. The question is not which single definition will prevail, but rather how we prevent the term from being captured by actors whose primary interest is marketing rather than genuine transformation.

Lessons from the Organic Precedent

We have been here before. The evolution of organic agriculture offers both instructive lessons and stark warnings.

In the 1970s and 1980s, organic farming existed as a patchwork of state and private certification programs. Consumer confusion and concerns about fraud led the organic industry itself to petition the United States Congress for federal standards. After more than a decade of debate, the National Organic Program was established in 2002.

But the path to federal standards revealed deep conflicts. When the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its initial proposed rules in 1997, they included provisions that would have allowed genetically modified organisms, irradiation, and sewage sludge in organic production. The organic community erupted. More than 275,000 people submitted comments, the most the USDA had ever received. The outcry forced the agency to reverse course and prohibit what became known as the "big three."

This moment demonstrated that massive public engagement can defend standards against government and industry pressure. It also revealed how easily definitions can be diluted by powerful interests if vigilance lapses.

And that vigilance has indeed lapsed. Today, many in the organic movement argue that federal standards have been steadily weakened. Large-scale operations with thousands of confined chickens qualify as organic with minimal outdoor access. Hydroponic operations that never touch soil receive organic certification. Dairy operations continuously bring in non-organic cows to boost production. Corporate consolidation has led to what critics call "industrial organic," where the letter of the law is met while the spirit is lost.

The result has been the emergence of add-on certifications like the Real Organic Project, created by farmers who concluded that the USDA organic label no longer represents what they consider authentic organic agriculture. These farmers are essentially starting over, building new standards on top of the federal baseline.

The lesson is sobering. Federal standardization enabled the organic market to grow from a fringe movement to a multibillion-dollar industry, but that very success attracted corporate interests that have, in many cases, transformed organic from a radical alternative into something uncomfortably close to what it was meant to oppose.

Will regenerative agriculture follow the same trajectory?

The Global Dimension

These definitional battles play out differently across the world, and we need to be mindful as to how standards developed primarily in the Global North might affect farmers in the Global South.

In wealthy countries, the regenerative agriculture conversation often focuses on transitioning large-scale commodity agriculture away from chemical dependency. The question is how to make industrial farming less destructive.

In much of the Global South, the situation is fundamentally different. Millions of smallholder farmers already practice many regenerative techniques by necessity. They intercrop because it reduces risk. They save seed because purchased inputs are expensive. They maintain diverse farming systems because that is how their families have farmed for generations. They integrate livestock and crops because the synergies make economic sense.

Yet these farmers often lack access to markets that would reward their practices. They face pressure to adopt industrial methods as a condition of credit or participation in value chains. International development programs sometimes still promote the very chemical-intensive approaches that regenerative agriculture seeks to move beyond.

If regenerative standards are defined primarily by and for large-scale operations in wealthy countries, we risk creating outcome verification systems that are too expensive or bureaucratically complex for smallholder farmers to access. We could inadvertently exclude the very people who have the most to teach us about regenerative practices.

At the same time, some of the most innovative regenerative agriculture happening anywhere is emerging from partnerships between smallholder farmers and organizations committed to agroecological approaches. These initiatives often combine indigenous knowledge with contemporary science, creating farming systems that are genuinely regenerative while also improving farmer livelihoods.

The challenge is to develop frameworks that honor this diversity rather than imposing uniformity. This means ensuring that smallholder farmers in the Global South have a voice in how regenerative agriculture is defined, not just in how it is practiced.

What Is at Stake

The question of who defines regenerative agriculture is ultimately about power. Will farmers, communities, and independent researchers shape these definitions? Or will corporations, government bureaucracies, and industrial agriculture interests capture the term and bend it to serve their purposes?

The stakes could not be higher. Agriculture is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. The way we grow food is a primary driver of biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and water pollution. If regenerative agriculture is to address these crises, it must represent genuine transformation, not incremental tweaks to business as usual.

We need definitions that are flexible enough to respect local contexts while rigorous enough to prevent greenwashing. We need standards that can scale to feed billions of people while remaining true to ecological principles. We need outcome verification models that are accessible to smallholder farmers while maintaining credibility with consumers.

This is not easy. Perhaps it is impossible to achieve perfectly. But we have an obligation to try.

The organic precedent suggests that once definitions become codified in law and captured by large economic interests, they become very difficult to reform. The time to shape how regenerative agriculture is defined is now, while the movement is still young enough to be influenced by voices beyond the corporate boardroom.

This means engaging in the public processes that are defining regenerative agriculture at the state and federal level in various countries. It means moving away from prescriptive certification of practices to the outcome verification of results actually achieved. It means being willing to challenge corporate claims that use regenerative language while maintaining fundamentally extractive practices.

Most importantly, it means remembering that regenerative agriculture is not just a set of techniques. It is a commitment to healing the relationship between farming and the land, between production and ecology, between human communities and the natural systems that sustain us all.

Who gets to define what that means will play a key role in shaping the future of food. We should all pay attention to how this unfolds.

SOURCE: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/regenerative-agriculture-faces-its-reali…
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-gets-define-regenerative-agriculture…