Our focus Food Growing our Future US Growing our Future US was a collaboration of over 135 partners – from farming communities to advocacy coalitions to major food, fiber, and retail brands – working together to deepen and accelerate the transition to a just and regenerative agriculture system in the United States. From 2020-2025, Growing our Future transformed how diverse changemakers see food and agriculture, piloted new models, and contributed to system change. Read our newest insights piece, What it will take to transform US agriculture: Looking back to look forward, exploring what we've learned over the past five years and where we can go from here. Our work was grounded in the voices and experiences of farmers. In 2025, we spoke with farmers and producers across the US about what regeneration means in their unique contexts and sectors. Hear their perspectives in Regeneration in Action. Learn from Indigenous agriculturalists working at the forefront of regeneration in our Frontlines of Indigenous Agriculture series. Explore our tools & resources from the 5-year collaborative period Growing our Future’s 5-year retrospective: Looking back to look forward -- how we can catalyze the regenerative agriculture transition Finance the Transition Explore our work on financing a just transition to regenerative agriculture, including our 2024 report Ecosystem Services Market Programs in Action and more. Shift Policy See how we advanced policy to support regenerative agriculture through our policy education toolkit and Farm Bill advocacy. Embed Social Outcomes Use our toolkits to integrate social outcomes as a core pillar of a just and regenerative agriculture system. Build Pathways to Regenerative Markets Discover how we helped catalyze new pathways to market and scale innovative marketplace models for regenerative products. Read our Flagship Reports Growing our Future: What’s next for regenerative agriculture? - June 2022 Scaling regenerative in the USA - June 2020 What was Growing our Future? Regenerative agriculture has game-changing potential -- but are we maximizing it? Conventional food and agriculture contributes to urgent ecological and social challenges like carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and precarious livelihoods. Regenerative agriculture offers a solution, but as the movement grows, we need to work together to ensure that interventions that restore nature also support people, especially farmers. Growing our Future aimed to deepen and accelerate the transition to an agriculture system that is socially and ecologically just and regenerative. Through collaboration, we harnessed the true potential of a regenerative transition. Our values-driven, systemic approach was key to what made us different. Growing our Future inspired changemakers throughout the food and agriculture system to imagine a future in which both people and planet thrive. A platform for collaborative action, our work was guided by five principles: Shifting mindsets and narratives towards a more holistic understanding of regeneration. Addressing power dynamics and advancing social equity. Centering farming, ranching, and farmworker communities. Fostering connectivity and building systemic capabilities of changemakers. Piloting and scaling innovative action. Growing our Future was shaped by five years of deep, intentional collaboration with our community. It draws on Forum's 30 years of experience in sustainability, systems change, futures, and innovation in design. And in support of our guiding principles, Growing our Future re-distributed and sub-granted over $200,000 to grassroots partners and historically underserved producers in 2024. A small step towards repatterning power dynamics, this enabled over 45 farmers and ranchers to participate in workshops, conferences, policymaking, and more, through network-building, travel scholarships and honoraria. “Forum for the Future’s Growing Our Future initiative team’s approach to program management, insight development, and professionalism has greatly influenced the project approach that ESMC has taken toward our IRJ [inclusion and racial justice] and project management strategy. The team’s publishing of key takeaways & learnings from phase 1 of the cotton pilot - via the ‘Financing the Transition’ toolkit - and proactive approach in leveraging that work in the design of phase 2 has created a model that has inspired ESMC to invest in content and messaging of our own as a vehicle for amplifying and building community around our other project work.” - Doug Adams, Manager, Member Engagement & Equity, Ecosystems Services Market Consortium (ESMC) What we do A brief history of the project 2020 | Landscape analysis + collaborative system diagnosis: Growing our Future officially commenced with a systems diagnosis of agriculture in the US, identifying four critical issues with the potential to accelerate the uptake of regenerative agriculture. These leverage points became the foundation for the initiative’s four workstreams: pathways to market, financing the transition, shifting policy, and integrating social outcomes into regenerative programs. Scaling regenerative agriculture in the US looked at the US agriculture system from a systems lens and uncovers geographically specific barriers and enabling factors to scale regenerative agriculture in the US. 2021 | Workstream launch: To advance the four workstreams, we convened diverse changemakers from across the system to develop a shared understanding of the collective action needed to shift the system. 2022 | Collaborative resource development: We published a second report, making the case for urgent and deep transformation in the US’ agricultural system. It assessed the dynamic but piecemeal progress being made towards regenerative agriculture and examined how Growing our Future can support a deep and collaborative transition that centers social wellbeing and environmental resilience. Impact Spotlight: focus on cotton In 2022 we began our pilot in regenerative cotton with the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium (ESMC), the first-ever application of a regenerative protocol to US cotton. We partnered with producers, enrolling 2,276 acres across four states to incorporate new regenerative practices, and removed over 191.552 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e) from the atmosphere. 2023 | Toolkit launch: The initial three-year strategic plan culminated in four toolkits, inspired by the workstreams, to share learnings, insights, and tangible resources for action. We also continued to prioritize shifting narratives on regenerative agriculture with the Frontline of Indigenous Agriculture Series. Impact Spotlight: toolkits to advance collective action Explore the toolkits for financing the transition, social outcomes, pathways to market, and policy. 2024 | Application + implementation in context: Growing our Future narrowed its focus to tangible action within the financing the transition and policy workstreams through place-based applications. Ecosystem Services Market Programs in Action shared the learnings from the first phase of the cotton pilot, which concluded in early 2024. And a collaboration in Colorado helped shape legislation that incentivizes regenerative and local souring. In keeping with the initiative’s focus on shifting power in the system, we established an Advisory Council to help inform the strategic direction of the initiative. 2025 | Looking back to look forward: We brought the initiative to a close by deeply reconnecting with the Growing our Future community, revisiting our initial leverage points for change published in our 2020 landscape analysis. We continued cultivating relationships with food and agriculture stakeholders to explore pathways to bring the insights from the initiative to life. Among others, we hosted a workshops in partnership with organizations like Field to Market and held a 5-year retrospective series in partnership with WhyRegenerative and the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, resulting in an addendum to our 2023 toolkit. Simultaneously, we continued to prioritize conversations with farmers, sharing four farmers stories and reflections on regenerative agriculture in Regeneration in Action. Partnerships bringing Growing our Future insights to life Harnessing the potential of collaboration to scale regenerative dairy Growing our Future and the Dairy Grazing Alliance (DGA) partnered in 2024 to develop, bolster, and scale regenerative dairy systems. Having identified the dairy sector’s potential to yield high impact climate mitigation, increased soil and water quality, and rural development, we guided the DGA's leadership team in honing a new vision and mission and co-designed and facilitated an industry-wide convening of the managed grazing dairy sector, equipping over 40 changemakers to transform the dairy industry through finance, policy, and marketplace building. Cultivating equitable pathways to market for regenerative producers How might we collaborate across the supply chain and with conservation districts to build equitable, inclusive marketplaces for climate smart commodities? Grounded in a shared vision for regenerative value networks, we convened over 70 diverse stakeholders and soil and water conservation district leaders at the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD) at their Summer and Annual meetings. This culminated in the development of guidance, presented to NACD and in a public webinar, to enable programmatic and grantmaking efforts to truly support producers access to new marketplaces for regenerative products. Thank you to the people at the heart of Growing our Future Since 2020, we have collaborated with hundreds of changemakers from across the food and agriculture supply chain, and at every stage of their regenerative journey. Our partners include organizations that serve and represent BIPOC farming and ranching communities, leading businesses and brands, convenors, standard-setters, multipliers, and policy advocates. Special thanks to General Mills and the VF Foundation for their generous funding to enable this work. “There is such an elegant alignment between the goals of Growing our Future and FFAR. Through the four workstreams identified in Growing our Future, there are research needs that have been prioritized to ensure that producers can adopt practices that ensure resilient systems both financially and environmentally agroecosystems, center equity and justice, which aligns with FFAR’s commitment to DEI, and ensuring producer are partners in the design and implementation of the research. Forum for the Future has consistently been an excellent strategic partner through several FFAR initiatives and we look forward to more opportunities to collaborate in the future.” - LaKisha Odom, Ph.D., Scientific Program Director, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) Manage Cookie Preferences