Now live on 6 July 2023 – Our report, 'Scaling regenerative agriculture in the UK: Accelerating change through collaboration', calls for action to revolutionise the UK's food and farming system by promoting regenerative agricultural practices, and offers actionable insights to transform the way we produce and consume food.

Explore the report

Working together to accelerate the transition to regenerative food and agriculture in the United Kingdom

This decade brings a unique and urgent opportunity to reset the way we produce and consume food, as we tackle some of the biggest challenges to the health of both people and the planet. These are global challenges that need local and regional action.

Ongoing challenges such as inflation, the cost of living crisis, and the war in Ukraine have exposed the inequalities and weaknesses in global supply chains, the vulnerabilities of farmers, and the growing number of people unable to afford or access healthy food.

Regenerative farming - including agroecological approaches - could reduce UK agricultural emissions by up to 38%, restore soil health and ecosystems, support farmer livelihoods and contribute to better health.

Work to enable farmers to adopt regenerative practices is already happening. However, while businesses have the potential for genuinely trailblazing practice in reshaping the food and agriculture system, there is a long way to go.

A transition toward an agriculture system that is just and regenerative is an essential, if monumental, feat, with a closing window of time to act. We need to fundamentally transform our current system, into one that:

• restores ecosystems services at the landscape level (soil health, water quality, biodiversity;
• diversifies production systems;
• maximises nutrition and public health;
• builds connection between consumers and production;
• enables the equitable distribution of value;
• and fosters justice and social equity.

The Challenge

The food system needs to transform rapidly at scale and approaches to producing, purchasing, and consuming food will need to shift in order to meet the scale of change needed. Food and agriculture, both in the UK and internationally, have played a key role in climate impacts, land and nature degradation and, while contributing to mass production of cheap calories, fall far short of supporting equitable healthy diets for all. Farming and food production, with their close relationship to land, livelihoods, and human wellbeing, are at the forefront of regenerative transformation, from nature restoration to carbon drawdown, to access to healthy, sustainable diets.

The scale of agricultural transformation required to meet carbon and biodiversity goals in a socially just way requires significant investment and practice change. 

Some businesses understand the need for a shift to regenerative agriculture in their supply chain, but can be held back by the demand for cheap food and a focus on shareholder return. They also do not yet have all the answers to implementing commitments such as sourcing from net zero farms.

More farmers are adopting regenerative approaches, but face risks in doing so and they may need to move from producing a single crop to producing a range of products and services. For this to be viable, changes are needed within mainstream food retailer value chains such as longer term contracting, risk sharing and paying fair value to farmers. These retailers also need to work pre-competitively with their shared suppliers to deliver joined-up change. 

Actors across the whole UK food and farming sector need the space to build trusted relationships and collaborate effectively if they are to learn together, scale new practices, work across supply chains and solve shared problems.

The future of food and farming will need to encompass environmental, social and economic outcomes as well as redefined value and risk distribution if we are to create a future-fit food system that provides everyone with nutritious affordable food, while ensuring farmers can earn good livelihoods and the environment is regenerated rather than exploited.

Many of the challenges and barriers we face are both structural and cultural, so will need a great degree of collaboration and shared learning if solutions are to be found that work for all and can be catalysed quickly. We need to harness the momentum that regenerative agriculture has and ensure actors across the food system are collaborating and driving change together.

Growing our Future UK: Our approach

Forum for the Future’s Growing our Future programme aims to support the action that is already underway through system-wide co-created opportunities for collaboration that enable new partnerships and pathways to action. It is not here to replicate or duplicate existing efforts but to bring together all those working towards a more just and regenerative food system to maximise shared impact.

This collaboration aims to address three key questions: 

• Where is there potential to catalyse new or increased action in the transition to regenerative agriculture, through more coherent, collaborative action and how can this potential be realised?
• What role can major food companies play in enabling the shift to regenerative production and consumption, and what do they need to enable this?
• How can the UK food system unlock new routes to market that connect regenerative producers and consumers through new business models, and infrastructure, and what more is needed?

Over 2022 to 2024, we are bringing together actors in two key ways:

1) Enabling cross-sector action

Throughout 2023 and 2024, Growing our Future is bringing together food system actors in focused collaborative working sessions. These will be in person wherever possible, alongside other major events in the food and agriculture calendar, and geographically dispersed, to engage actors across the nations. Together, participants are collectively defining which priority areas warrant collaborative action, where there is potential to develop programmes of work and pathways to action.

2) A pilot with a major retailer and its farmers on business model and practice changes to support adoption of regenerative practices

Additionally, Growing our Future will also host an innovation sprint - a rapid workshop process - to reveal what is needed for niche and disruptive actors to grow alternative routes to market and greater market access for regenerative producers and farmers. This will build momentum for innovation by identifying priority areas for action, raising visibility of existing initiatives that show how new approaches can work in practice, alongside what the wider mainstream food and agriculture sector can do to enable these shifts.

Case Study: Exploring the opportunities for and barriers to the adoption of regenerative farming practices in the M&S potato grower base

During the development phase of Growing our Future, Forum for the Future worked with long-term partner and leading British retailer, Marks and Spencer (M&S), to explore how to “find fair mechanisms between retailers, suppliers, processors, and farmers and growers to share both the risks and the benefits of the transition”. 

The intention of this pilot was to explore the role M&S can play to support shifts in conventional agricultural practices to more regenerative agriculture approaches, working within its potato supply chain. 

This case study, ongoing since 2021, has provided invaluable insights and learnings around what approaches would support M&S growers to adopt regenerative practices in a way that builds soil fertility and carbon whilst avoiding impact on quality and remaining commercially viable for the grower and M&S. Insights from this case study will be fed into the collaboration. 

Join us in Growing our Future

Growing our Future aims to bring together the vast range of perspectives, expertise and initiatives to collaboratively identify opportunities to catalyse faster and deeper transformation. It is not a membership programme, nor a secretariat or a pay-to-play collaboration. Through time-bound co-creative activities, participants can together identify and shape areas of work that are ripe for action, and help ensure existing work creates maximum impact to transform our food system.

We welcome people and organisations from across the food system to join us: 

• UK farmers, growers or farming and growing networks interested in regenerative agriculture, whether aiming to transition existing operations, to scale the work you already do, or to address barriers to entry;
• UK businesses, brands and retailers that are exploring how future business models or value chains could support farmers in adopting regenerative agriculture;
• Policymakers seeking to create a supporting environment for action commensurate with the challenges the UK’s food system faces;
• NGOs and civil society involved in creating the enabling conditions for change in the UK’s food system;
• Investors or finance actors seeking to leverage financial mechanisms to catalyse positive food system transformation;
• Existing food system collaborations and networks looking to maximise reach and potential for impact;
• Organisations interested in food innovation, particularly in new access and alternative routes to markets for farmers producing regenerative food and services;
• Consumer groups and other actors with a stake in the shift to more regenerative food and farming.

We invite you to join us to meet the urgency for transformation, while ensuring a robust shift that delivers across our social, environmental and economic goals and paves the way for a thriving just and regenerative future.

If you are interested in learning more about Growing our Future, get in touch with Valentina Toledo.

Who’s involved 

This project is made possible with funding from the Carbon Innovation Fund, a partnership between Co-op and the Co-op Foundation; John Ellerman Foundation and People’s Postcode Lottery.

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Related links:

• Report: Scaling regenerative agriculture in the UK: Accelerating change through collaboration
• Growing our Future: Scaling Regenerative Agriculture in the United States
• Report: Supply Chain Synergies – What is the appropriate role of supply chains in achieving responsible production at farm level? , commissioned by the Oxford Farming Conference 
• Podcast: With a narrow window for innovation, will our food systems transform or unravel?