REGENERATIVE

Ryan Pintado-Vertner
CEO & Founder of Smoketown, Author of Big Fight™

AI dominates headlines, but a completely different concept — one that is arguably AI’s antithesis, or perhaps at least its retaining wall — is actually the most important and potent idea in the modern food industry.

Regenerative agriculture is such a big concept that it resists definition. Most narrowly defined, regenerative is an approach to stewarding farmland and ranches that produces healthier soil using methods that, in turn, generate more nutritious food, shift carbon from the atmosphere to the soil, create more biodiverse ecosystems, and give cropland more resiliency. And that’s an incomplete list of its benefits. (Nor does it fully capture what regen does for natural fibers like cotton and hemp.)

What’s remarkable is that, even with all of that said, regenerative is even bigger still. Its tenets, when separated from agriculture, can be applied to our relationships, our economics, our approach to diversity, equity & inclusion — and on and on.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this: Between 2019 and 2022, the number of agricultural and corporate entities using the term grew by over 2X to 549, according to the regen advocacy nonprofit Kiss The Ground. Companies making substantial commitments to regenerative include some of the largest food companies in the world, like General Mills and Unilever, and some of the most disruptive, like Simple Mills, Lundberg Family Farms and SIMPLi.

The reason for this is simple: regenerative has exceptional promise. Like most exceptional ideas, it is rooted in something quite ancient. Regenerative works precisely because it cooperates with the way the Earth and its inhabitants were originally designed — and thus it is deeply indigenous, deeply scientific and (dare I say) deeply theological, all at once.

As with anything ambitious, it has challenges, too — many of which I’ll write about in future posts here.

But that’s not the focus right now. The focus is you. Regenerative is such a big idea that, in the coming years, it is likely to impact you no matter what you do, so be intentional about that impact. Find your authentic place within it, and then own that place with integrity.

It starts with learning more. Here are some resources that have been helping me.

READ:

• What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land & Reclaim Our Health by David R Montgomery & Anne Bikle. A masterful, accessible review of the science behind why regeneratively raised food is measurably healthier.

• Kiss the Ground’s educational resources and Ethan Soloviev’s extensive compendium of education, books, definitions, etymologies, etc.

STREAM:

• Kiss the Ground’s films (here and here)

• Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food is a podcast that takes a global sweep across the entire regen landscape.

• Regenerative Agriculture Podcast goes deep on the agronomic realities and nuances of implementing regenerative with growers and ranchers.

• Regen Brands is a podcast that fully immerses you in the ecosystem of entrepreneurs who are trying to scale regenerative CPG brands (and also has an amazing, dynamic running list of regen brands).