Pathways to market and proliferating a new marketplace model for regenerative products

Working together to ensure that regeneratively-produced goods can make it from seed to shelf – supporting agricultural producers to steward regenerative practices by leveraging supply chain coordination.

This work was part of a collaborative initiative of the Growing our Future US project from 2020-2025.

Explore our tools & resources from the 5-year collaborative period

Don’t miss our 2023 Regenerative Value Networks toolkit

to consider how we can reconfigure relationships, reimagine how regenerative products are sold and bought, and cultivate new, equitable marketplaces for regenerative goods.

Use our worksheets

to facilitate a conversation to identify practical actions for regenerative marketplace building that meet the needs of your community, region, coalition, or organization? Start with bridging the gap between the present and the future and then take it a step further with an action sprint to lay the foundation for equitable pathways to market for regenerative goods in your supply shed or growing region.

Review our recommendations

that emerged from our work engaging diverse cross-sector audiences on what would create the enabling conditions for agricultural producers to take their regeneratively grown products to market. These are especially helpful if you are a funder, policymaker, or regenerative agriculture practitioner looking to support and co-create more equitable pathways to market for regeneratively-grown goods.

Background: Why we focused on Pathways to Market

Our current agricultural marketplace and conventional supply channel model works well for large farms and large buyers focusing on low-cost bulk trade in a few federally subsidized commodities. However, it does not deliver the environmental or livelihood outcomes needed and farmers farming regeneratively have limited market access.

Markets are often scarce for regeneratively produced farm outputs – such as harvest from cover crops integral for rotational systems, or new soil-building specialty crops that don’t meet volume needs of larger buyers. There’s immense opportunity for collaboration across the supply chain to address the infrastructure needs to build pathways to market that also address equity and access needs of smaller-scale producers historically shut out of institutional marketplaces.

In 2020, as part of the Growing our Future initiative, Forum for the Future has set out to explore:

What if we reimagined how regenerative products are sold and bought? How could reconfiguring relationships within a new marketplace model be the ‘secret sauce’ for strengthening regenerative marketplaces?

A new marketplace model – one that is in line with the principles of regenerative agriculture – is needed: a Regenerative Value Network (RVN) model – with the potential to provide a decentralized, collaborative, and regenerative model for the production, distribution, and purchasing of regenerative products, fostering a more resilient, equitable, and regenerative marketplace.

Reconfiguring relationships between buyers and sellers from transactional exchanges to collaborative partnerships is a fundamental aspect of RVNs, enabling the alignment of shared regenerative goals and fostering a more resilient and just food system.

Highlights and learnings from our Pathways to Market work, 2020-2025

In 2023, we published From conventional supply channels to Regenerative Value Networks: A new model for a regenerative marketplace, a resource for buyers and sellers seeking to understand the current challenges, potential opportunities, and emerging solutions for selling and sourcing of regeneratively produced goods. This toolkit serves as a guide to the underlying principles and pillars that form the foundation of this transformative model, providing ambitious vision coupled with practical guidance for buyers and sellers to drive positive change and operationalize a new marketplace model - Regenerative Value Networks.

Across two workshops held at the National Association Districts Summer Meeting (2023) and Annual Meeting (2024), we worked to enable agricultural producer voices from across the United States to align on identifying barriers and developing solutions within our unique spheres of influence.

Spotlight on Regeneration in Action: Leveraging soil and water conservation district networks to activate pathways to market for regenerative products

In 2023-24, we united with the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD) to explore the question: How might we collaborate across the supply chain and with national and state networks of Soil & Water Conservation Districts to build marketplaces for climate smart commodities?

What did we learn from these cross-sector gatherings to inform how we approach regenerative marketplace building?

Our gatherings underscored the importance of understanding and amplifying farmer needs, to create better pathways to access direct capital and infrastructure. We can get there by collectively increasing capacity building and grant matching opportunities. Ultimately, funders, conservation groups, and practitioners in the space should aim to change the paradigm of grantmaking to better meet the unique needs of growers.

Above photo: Participants discuss place-based solutions for marketplace access for the coastal West and Pacific Northwest regions at the NACD Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA.

“This workshop really offered me the opportunity to value how we can zoom in from a 30,000ft perspective to begin to hone in on actionable steps that utilize the vast network of connections in the food/ag space. It’s going to take so many levers and networks working together to implement the desired changes and each of these conversations gets us one step closer to identifying the beginning steps to getting this work done.” - Participant at the 2023 Summer Meeting in North Dakota

Join us

Work with Forum experts to co-create a farmer-first procurement strategy for your business. We’ve worked with leading businesses globally to create context-specific value chain strategies, including material sourcing protocols that meet both planetary and farmer livelihood outcomes. We’d love to support you to ensure that your regenerative sourcing guidelines ladder up to your wider organizational strategy.

Email [email protected] to learn more and join us in Forum for the Future’s food and agriculture work.

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