Regenerative Agriculture Is Having a Moment. Here's How the Rockefeller Foundation's Pitching In
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During the most recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last November, the Rockefeller Foundation announced it was awarding $11 million in grants to 10 organizations working in regenerative agriculture. Rockefeller’s aims here are bold. The grants are designated to scale up development, data analysis, financing and education around regenerative agriculture toward the goal of addressing the interwoven crises of climate change, hunger and malnutrition by changing global food systems.
Rockefeller believes that transitioning to more sustainable agriculture practices cannot rest solely in the hands of food companies. Instead, this transition should center Indigenous peoples — many of whom are regenerative agriculture’s foremost practitioners — and lift up farmers so they can lead the shift.
These grants are part of Rockefeller’s Good Food Strategy, a $105 million initiative to make healthy and sustainable foods more accessible around the world. Launched last year, the Good Food Strategy represents a shift for Rockefeller from a long history of backing food causes focused largely around supply and productivity — including last century’s controversial Green Revolution — to a more systems-focused, intersectional approach.
Rockefeller is providing grants across three areas of focus: Indigenous peoples’ traditional ecological knowledge and food systems, regenerative data and networks, and regenerative impact and scaling. Grantees include the Amazon Conservation Team, Deep Medicine Circle, Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty, the Ecdysis Foundation and the Naandi Foundation.
“We’re really trying to think about the ways that a transformed food system can contribute to our priorities and climate health and equity,” said Devon Klatell, who leads Rockefeller’s U.S. food work. The foundation’s new support for regenerative agriculture touches on all those bases.
What is regenerative agriculture?
There’s no single definition for regenerative agriculture. Generally speaking, though, regenerative agriculture is the practice of approaching farming from a holistic point of view rather than an extractionist or industrialist one.
For Sara Farley, who leads Rockefeller’s global food work, regenerative agriculture is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, regenerative agriculture is a process that can sequester carbon and improve soil health. This is the opposite of synthetic or chemically dependent input agriculture.
For many, this is the primary focus of regenerative agriculture. Soil health, for example, is vitally important for both our food production systems and for the planet itself. Some soil health principles — and regenerative agriculture principles as a whole — include no tilling, cover cropping and diverse rotations, according to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
At the midpoint of the spectrum, Farley said, is mitigating biodiversity loss and preserving water quality — both major issues around the globe. “Biodiversity loss attributed to land conversion is one of the biggest drivers of the 10,000 species that we are losing a year to extinction,” Farley said. “So it’s possible through a different kind of process — a regenerative process — to not only stop causing biodiversity loss, but actually build back biodiversity, both microbial diversity within the soil, but also flora and fauna biodiversity.”
On the other end of the spectrum, some ascribe a far broader range of meanings to regenerative agriculture. “A number of practitioners, scholars and community groups, especially Indigenous people and others, say ‘regenerative’ is a deep word,” Farley said. “It’s not just talking about the biophysical dimensions, it is talking about our connection as humans to our spiritual traditions, to our culture, to our place, to our identity.”
Rockefeller, for its part, has joined an expanding collection of grantmakers interested in this work. It’s part of Funders for Regenerative Agriculture (FORA), a philanthropy-serving organization focused on funding and implementing programs that will increase the adoption of regenerative agriculture. As we reported last year, FORA’s membership is diverse and growing, and includes big names like the Walton Family Foundation, Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor, and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
Supporting Indigenous-led work
Current hype aside, regenerative agriculture is not a new practice. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have been developing and engaging in forms of regenerative agriculture, which is why a significant portion of these Rockefeller grants are going to Indigenous-led organizations.
One grantee, the Amazon Conservation Team, will advance and monitor Indigenous agroforestry and regenerative practices in tropical South America. According to Rockefeller, the work will engage traditional elders, women and young people in both the Andean Amazon and Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
Another grant to Deep Medicine Circle will support its Farming as Medicine program. Among other things, Deep Medicine Circle seeks to recognize farmers as stewards, decommodify food, and remove fruits, vegetables and herbs from the market economy to a system of care. Funding will support Indigenous land management on the Te Kwe A’naa Warep farm in Ramaytush territory in San Gregorio, California.
As a final example, the Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty will provide training, networks and capacity-building to Indigenous youth around the globe — Northeast India, Northern Thailand, the Mau Forest in Kenya, and Quintana Roo in Mexico.
“We’re really excited because it’s a new chapter for Rockefeller to have a suite of Indigenous-led grants. We’re just really proud of the fact that that’s happening within the food team and through this lens of food systems,” Farley said. “The grants vary, but I think the unifying principle is about empowerment. It’s about elevating the data and evidence that is coming from Indigenous people that lets us have a more comparative and global view.”
This recent slate of grants from Rockefeller is just one recent example of big-name funders getting behind work at the intersection of Indigenous-led land protection and climate change mitigation. For instance, the Forest Tenure Funders Group — which is made up of almost two-dozen private funders and governments, including philanthropic heavyweights like the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Sobrato Philanthropies — pledged $1.7 billion over five years to support Indigenous communities that protect tropical forests. Only 7% of the grants that have been distributed, however, have gone to organizations actually led by Indigenous people and communities.
The “largest agricultural experiment that’s ever been attempted”
Another one of Rockefeller’s recent grantees is the Ecdysis Foundation, which is focused on research and development around transforming agriculture using regenerative principles. The core focus of Ecdysis’ research is how to increase biodiversity and reduce farmland disturbance to make agroecosystems more resilient and better able to produce healthier foods.
Last year, Ecdysis launched its 1,000 Farms Initiative, which founder and director Dr. Jonathan Lundgren calls the “largest agricultural experiment that’s ever been attempted.” The purpose of the initiative is multifold: to identify regenerative food systems in different regions, to validate successful regenerative operations, to create a roadmap for farmers who wish to make the transition to regenerative food production systems, and to find ways to optimize these systems.
But analyzing farms isn’t cheap. While farmers don’t have to pay anything, it costs about $7,500 for every farm included in the study. Rockefeller is sponsoring farms so they can be included in Ecdysis’ research. In particular, the foundation is looking to ensure that underrepresented groups, like women-owned operations or those led by people of color, are included in the work.
“We need bold action, we need people that are going to do something, not just talk about it, but do something. And so you know, incremental changes are not going to get us there. We need something bold,” Lundgren said.
The 1,000 Farms Initiative is envisioned as a 10-year project, with the first few years being the most intense. Data from the research will be provided to the farmers to help them make decisions about their work. The initiative is currently based in North America, but there are plans to expand it globally.
With Rockefeller’s grant, the Ecdysis Foundation will also develop a fellowship for individuals from underrepresented groups to train in regenerative agriculture and related science through the 1,000 Farms Initiative.
Transforming our relationship with the planet
For its proponents, regenerative agriculture is about far more than increasing the efficiency of our food production systems. It’s more than a way of feeding more people, though that is, of course, a necessary and important goal. Regenerative agriculture practitioners see it as a way of improving not just the health of our species, but the health of the planet, as well.
For Lundgren, regenerative agriculture offers the potential to solve planet-scale problems like climate change, water scarcity, hunger and biodiversity loss.
“What gets me so excited is we are — maybe for the first time in human history — studying a continent or a nation’s food system on a very intimate level,” Lundgren said. “At this pivotal point in human history, we are meeting the changemakers that are gonna save our place on this planet.”
In addition to its regenerative agriculture grants, Rockefeller has also announced a $4.6 million investment to scale Food is Medicine initiatives in the hopes of preventing, managing and treating diet-related illness in the U.S.
“I think we’re at a really exciting moment where people are starting to make connections between the changes we need in the food system and these other sorts of societal priorities around climate and health and equity,” Klatell said. “And I’m optimistic as we go forward that doing more of the systems work and building more of those connections will also enable us to really transform the food system more quickly.”