Warning: Regenerative Ag is at Risk for a Big Ag Power Play

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If you’ve spent any time around conversations about food and farming lately, you’ve heard the word regenerative. It’s everywhere — on packaging, in corporate sustainability reports, and in social media posts about “healing the soil.”

At its best, regenerative agriculture represents one of the most hopeful ideas in our food system: that we can repair what decades of industrial farming have damaged — from degraded soil to polluted water to broken rural economies. But at its worst, it’s fast becoming a marketing slogan that big corporations are using to greenwash business-as-usual practices.

This isn’t alarmism. It’s a warning. Regeneration — a movement built by small, innovative farmers — is now at risk of being hijacked by Big Ag.

The Promise of Regenerative Ag

At its heart, regenerative agriculture is about healing — soil, water, biodiversity, and community. It’s about farming in a way that restores life rather than extracting from it. Farmers use tools like crop rotation, cover crops, rotational grazing, composting, and integrating livestock to build healthier ecosystems.

Unlike “organic,” however, regenerative has no universally accepted definition or certification. There’s no USDA label, no standard checklist, no enforcement mechanism. That flexibility can be helpful for small farms experimenting with diverse practices — but it also opens the door wide for exploitation.

When Flexibility Becomes a Loophole

Without clear standards, the meaning of regenerative changes from farm to farm, and company to company. For one farmer, it may mean never tilling the soil and keeping living roots in the ground. For another, it might mean integrating livestock on cropland. For a corporate giant, it might mean… planting a single cover crop and calling it a day.

Elasticity is great for marketing. But it’s terrible for trust.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. Major food companies like PepsiCo, General Mills, and Cargill have jumped on the regenerative bandwagon. They know consumers love the idea of healing the planet, and they’re investing millions in campaigns and partnerships that use the term liberally.

Just this month, National Geographic published a glossy, PepsiCo-funded feature about Iowa farmers using “regenerative” practices through a corporate initiative. The framing sounded good — but it didn’t answer the most important questions: What practices? Which farms? And according to whose standards?

When pressed for those answers, most corporate programs hit a wall. The details are vague, the metrics inconsistent, and the standards opaque. The result: the regenerative label is being used to describe very conventional operations with only superficial changes.

The Stakes for Small Farmers

This isn’t a semantic debate — it’s an economic one.

When Big Ag co-opts the language of regeneration, it undermines the small and mid-sized farmers who built the movement from the ground up. Farmers who truly practice regenerative methods — often at personal financial risk — can’t compete with the marketing power of multinational corporations.

Without clear standards, consumers who want to support real soil health and biodiversity can’t tell the difference between authentic regeneration and corporate greenwash. That confusion erodes trust in the entire movement and robs small farmers of the price premiums they deserve.

In essence, Big Ag gets the halo. Small farmers get left behind.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

This story isn’t new. Organic agriculture began as a radical alternative — a farmer-led rebellion against chemical-intensive, extractive farming. But when organic certification became standardized, Big Ag moved in, scaled up, and stripped it of much of its original soul.

Regenerative hasn’t even gotten that far. It’s still undefined, which makes it even more vulnerable.

Unless we learn from the organic movement’s evolution — and its compromises — we risk losing regenerative agriculture before it’s even begun.

The Bigger Picture: A Cracked Foundation

In a recent One Bite is Everything episode, I outlined ten warning signs that point toward a food crisis: shrinking farmland, labor shortages, consolidation, policy cuts, investor land grabs, climate pressures, and more. The story of regenerative agriculture connects directly to all of them.

When we allow regenerative to become a buzzword rather than a benchmark, it distracts us from the deeper, systemic problems in our food system. It gives the illusion of progress while the ground beneath us — literally and figuratively — continues to erode.

If Big Ag can claim the regenerative mantle while continuing to operate massive monocultures, relying on cheap labor, and consolidating farmland, then nothing fundamental changes. It’s the same system with a greener label.

What Real Regeneration Looks Like

True regeneration isn’t about perfection — it’s about integrity. It’s about transparent practices, regional adaptation, and continuous improvement rooted in ecological principles.

A regenerative farm doesn’t just reduce harm; it builds resilience. It values farmers as stewards, not laborers on the corporate payroll. It fosters biodiversity, strengthens local economies, and invests in community health.

Real regeneration can’t be dictated from a boardroom or defined by a marketing department. It’s built in the soil — by farmers who live on the land and depend on its long-term health.

A Call for Clarity and Accountability

If regenerative agriculture is to be more than a buzzword, it needs guardrails. Not rigid bureaucracy — but clarity. Transparency. Shared accountability.

We need a definition that farmers can stand behind, consumers can trust, and corporations can’t easily twist. We need frameworks that ensure that when a company claims “regenerative,” it means something measurable and real — not a vague promise that hides business-as-usual practices.

Without that, regeneration becomes yet another marketing fad, a feel-good distraction from a broken system that still prioritizes profit over people and the planet.

The Bottom Line

Regenerative agriculture matters. Soil health matters. Water cycles, biodiversity, and rural communities matter. But they can’t thrive on slogans.

Big Ag’s power play threatens to hollow out one of the most important movements of our time. The window to act — to define regeneration clearly and protect its meaning — is closing fast.

Because if we don’t, the next time you see “regenerative” on a food label, it might mean the exact opposite of what you think it does.

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Dana DiPrima is leading a national movement to support small American Farmers because our health, communities, environment, and regional economies depend on it. The For Farmers Movement supports farmers by sharing their stories, replacing myths with facts, and providing them with grants and other helpful resources.

Dana is also the host of One Bite is Everything, the podcast that connects the food on your plate to the bigger world by sharing conversations with thought leaders, helpful tips, and monthly recaps of key issues on the food and policy scene. One Bite is Everything is a proud member of Heritage Radio Network, home to some of the most influential voices in food.

Dana authors a weekly letter in addition to this blog. You can subscribe here. You can join the For Farmers Movement to support your local farmers here. You can also follow Dana on Instagram.