Giving Regenerative Agriculture an Agronomic Perspective: A Proposed Framework from the Food and Beverage Industry

Dominik Klauser^1,2*Julia De Candido¹Alexa M. Clark¹Yves Leclerc³Iver Drabaek⁴Margaret Henry⁵Sarah Lockwood⁶Rebecca Thomson⁷Joanna Lawrence⁸Martina Henry⁹Pascal Chapot¹⁰Lucas Urbano¹¹Robyn Cooper¹Dionys Forster¹

• ¹Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform, Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• ²University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
• ³McCain Foods, Florenceville, Canada
• ⁴Nordic Sugar A/S, København, Denmark
• ⁵PepsiCo (United States), Purchase, New York, United States
• ⁶Danone (France), Palaiseau, France
• ⁷Kepak Group, Damastown, Ireland
• ⁸Arla Foods (Denmark), Aarhus, Denmark
• ⁹Kraft Foods (United States), Northfield, Illinois, United States
• ¹⁰Nestle (Switzerland), Vevey, Switzerland
• ¹¹Unilever (United Kingdom), London, United Kingdom

Food systems face significant challenges that include increasing demand for agricultural products and accelerating environmental degradation. Regenerative agriculture has emerged as concept to reduce environmental harm while maintaining or even improving productivity. However, adoption of Regenerative Agriculture remains limited. This partly due to the absence of a shared definition and a standardised process to monitor, assess and report regenerative agriculture outcomes. This makes it difficult to incentivise its implementation at the farm level.To address this gap, the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform (SAI Platform),SAI Platform, a member-led organisation within the food and beverage sector, collaborated with stakeholders to develop a global framework for regenerative agriculture. Drawing from a review of existing frameworks and consultations with SAI Platform members, farmers, and academics, we developed a framework that defines regenerative agriculture as an outcome-based approach that enhances environmental impact. It includes eight regenerative agriculture outcomes across the environmental areas of soil health, biodiversity, water and climate and suggests indicators to quantify progress.Further, tThe framework process emphasises the need to understand local contexts and farmer needs when implementing regenerative agriculture to ensure just and equitable socio-economic outcomes. It does so through a four-step process that includes i) a context analysis to identify key material criteria of a production system, ii) the prioritisation of outcomes based on the context analysis, iii) the selection of practices to achieve improved performance against prioritised outcomes, and iv) the development and implementation of continuous improvement plans to monitor and report progress. This process allows for establishing locally relevant approaches and goals to implement regenerative agriculture.Farm groups or individual farms can use this framework to independently verify the implementation of the steps defined in the framework and claim different performance levels for progress towards regenerative agriculture. These are independent claims,claims createing a foundation for regenerative agriculture programmes, incentive mechanisms, and corporate reporting.While the framework is a starting point, collaboration and refinement are necessary to address evolving challenges in implementation. SAI Platform commits to research and stakeholder engagement to continuously improve the framework and support the fair transitions towards regenerative agriculture.