Collective Regeneration
A word from our Founder, Anthony Myint: This FAQ style of page explains how collective regeneration is the fastest (and totally transformative) approach to changing agriculture.
What if the sustainable option only cost 1% more?
It can. ZFP is creating a new normal in which businesses and their customers can directly support place-based, natural climate solutions projects. We team up any funds–often a few cents per purchase–with the most cost effective regenerative agriculture projects like compost application, cover crop planting, reduced tillage and more. In that way, we offer a service that is decarbonizing the food system. We accomplish this in a supply chain or community, one regenerative practice and once acre at a time.
What if Society Could Solve the Climate Crisis for 1%?
It can. According to Project Drawdown, the cost of solving the crisis and lowering temperatures by 2050 would be ~$29 trillion, which is ~1% of GDP each year. Other experts like John Doerr and Arun Majumdar estimate the cost as $400 trillion, including stranded assets. Either way, we believe every customer and every business can begin to take action with 1% and that, frankly, we can’t afford not to.
Why Regenerative Agriculture?
New biogeochemistry finds that agricultural carbon sequestration can lower earth’s temperatures and be a primary climate solution. Project Drawdown estimates the potential benefit of changing agriculture as 489 billion tons of carbon sequestration. Practices like regenerative cropping and managed grazing create ~$40 of benefit, savings and profitability for each $1 invested by improving prosperity, soil health, nutrient density, resilience, hydrology and biodiversity, resulting in cooler landscapes and thriving ecosystems and communities. Society can advance a shift towards farming with nature and focusing on biology (instead of farming against nature with a focus on chemicals). By redirecting even just a tiny portion of the food economy towards this transition, we can make frictionless and transformative change today.
Okay, so is the answer buying regenerative ingredients?
Not really. Please support regenerative farmers and ranchers!
It’s important! But that purchasing is about a great product and doesn’t lead to future, additional regeneration. Less than $0.16 of each food purchase reaches the farmer in the first place, and from that, $0.00 is earmarked for doing even more next season.
And then unfortunately, paying more for a regenerative ingredient from one farm certainly doesn’t help an entirely different farm transition, just like paying $50 for a fancy dinner doesn’t help a sandwich shop become a Michelin starred restaurant. This is why even after 50+ years, “Organic” represents just 1% of acres, even though at least 100,000 farmers are standing by to transition their fields.
What Does Collective Regeneration Mean?
We believe the change in agriculture is a big opportunity, like the necessary change in energy production, and so we need similar frameworks. In renewables, a homeowner may add a solar panel, but society also needs programs that “improve the grid” through simple collective economic action, like adding $1 per energy bill. Collective action programs have helped cities like Los Angeles and San Diego commit to 100% renewable energy and they will help communities commit to 100% regenerative agriculture (once collective regeneration is in full swing).
In renewable energy, collective action programs did not begin until 2010, but they are already enabling rapid transition (even amidst huge subsidies for fossil fuels). Every business and citizen can make similar progress on transitioning agriculture (even while advocacy groups work to change the Federal Farm Bill also).
Collective action programs have made huge strides in recycling, sustainable tire disposal, and living wages and this kind of mass balance approach is the only scalable pathway for transformative change in an aggregated food system. We can think of agriculture as a food grid, and we can regenify one acre and practice at a time, even if a product is only getting 1% percent more regenerative each year, each practice and each acre is progress.
Both “Regenerative” products and REGENERATION (a service!) are needed to transform food systems amidst capitalism, aggregation and entrenched subsidies.
How Do You Know Collective Regeneration Works?
A lot of trial and error.
For the past ~10 years Zero Foodprint has been evolving alongside our Co-Founder’s professional journey and society’s growing awareness around regenerative agriculture. This has involved collaboration with governments, researchers, farmers and businesses. The short answer is, we know firsthand because our business members and their customers are directly creating incredible public benefit on farms and ranches, and in communities across CA, CO, the US, and in Asia and Europe.
Why does ZFP Focus on “Practices” (instead of Better Choices, Outcomes or Credits)?
ZFP initially focused on operations and carbon neutrality. We conducted 57 Life Cycle Assessments and asked businesses to make better choices, like supporting great farms, reducing food waste and going plant forward. Over time we started to see all three as ways to “be good” and to conserve resources and do less harm, but not ways to change farming. We also learned that, ingredients were the vast majority of every food businesses’ carbon footprint and there was no supply of regenerative ingredients and so the only real way to make change was at the farm level.
Besides, thousands of organizations were already working on those “less-harm” efforts, but there didn’t even seem to be a direct way to change how food was grown–to increase the supply of regenerative ingredients by changing production. So we started doing it.
Certifications are a great way to ensure the integrity of products, and price premiums can help good farmers and ranchers keep their practices going. But just like you need the right tool for certain jobs, changing acres requires requires a more direct economic mechanism. Organic certification is well established and ubiquitous, but has not impacted 99% of acres after 50+ years and is therefore not the right tool for transforming agriculture with urgency.
Outcomes are incredibly important for product integrity and to justify high price premiums. But as with many services, like a home renovation or a taxi ride, an action requires a plan and then execution. And so as farmers and ranchers are forming their land management plans, Zero Foodprint makes it possible to team up with them and regenerate. Our approach is to view regeneration as a (new) service that can be offered to consumers and producers who want to create a new normal. See our impact so far.
Carbon Credits are characterized by industry middlemen who can take a lot of the resources. For more on carbon markets, see this position paper, but overall the market is too small, indirect and only retroactive.
Implicitly, all products are governed by a race to the lowest costs, whereas scaling regeneration relies on the maximum financial resources being directed to improved land management. Rather than a reward approach, we employ a resource allocation approach. To use an education analogy, instead of graduation parties and (even) higher salaries for Ivy Leaguers, we’d provide the equivalent of laptops and teacher compensation to team up with students and improve education. In this case, instead of a laptop, it’s funding for compost, cover crop seed and technical assistance.
What Does Success Look like?
The year is 2050. Temperatures have stabilized and are actually going down in regions where natural climate solutions are in full swing. There’s a lot of hope.
Despite our worst projections, we were able to survive because society made a critical choice: Instead of business as usual, we made solutions the norm. Instead of extractive capitalism we chose collective regeneration.
We started with $1/month on utilities and the trash bill to scale renewable energy and regenerative agriculture, and we added 1% to purchases–voluntarily at first, and then across the board. And when those investments in the transition were profitable and beneficial, we started going even faster.
In the end it took a global average of 2% of GDP every year to keep society under 2.0 degrees C of warming. It was much less than a credit card fee to actually solve the global crisis.
Organizations like Zero Foodprint made this possible for regenerative agriculture. We were able to engage hundreds of cities and counties to add $1/month on the trash bill to get compost onto local farms and ranches. We also worked with thousands of businesses to add optional 1% fees to fund regenerative agriculture-practices like planting cover crops, reducing tillage and managing grazing. The businesses agreed for marketing at first, because it’s what customers and employees preferred, and then local and state governments passed ordinances and climate solutions became the new normal.
Still with us? Welcome to the club. Let’s talk.