Can the food system go full circle to regenerative?

Small-scale producers are proving there is demand for food produced in harmony with nature, but scaling regenerative approaches requires a break with business as usual. By Nick Hughes.

It was on an all-too-rare baking hot day in July this summer that I spent a most rewarding morning in the company of farmer, Tom Morphew.

Morphew has had an eclectic career including stints as a nightclub bouncer and landscape gardener, but as he showed me around his 10-acre plot in the heart of the West Sussex countryside it was clear that ‘Farmer Tom’ had found his calling as founder and CEO of Full Circle Farms.

Based on the Chiddingly estate, the farm is pioneering a model that combines commercial regenerative farming with community support and wellbeing. On one plot of land, Morphew and his small team produce vegetables which are supplied to Sodexo’s Good Eating Company, Sodexo Live and schools and universities segments. On the other, he has established a community garden where people facing mental health issues like depression or anxiety benefit from what Morphew describes as “horticultural therapy”.

The work of Morphew and his team of volunteers – the so-called Garden Army – is profiled in a new Footprint Intelligence report in association with Nestlé Professional UK & Ireland, in which we explore the community benefits of regenerative agriculture and the role for businesses in unlocking them. 

Full Circle Farms is a great, albeit niche, example of how business support for regenerative farming can benefit the wider community, with the money generated through the Sodexo relationship allowing Morphew to provide the horticultural therapy for free.

But we should be under no illusion that the work of Full Circle Farms is somehow representative of the wider food system. At a slightly bigger scale, the likes of Wildfarmed and First Milk are showing there is a market for wheat and milk produced in regenerative systems, but in volume terms it’s a drop in the ocean compared with the commodities produced on conventional farms that disappear into long, opaque supply chains as soon as they leave the farm gate.

A key question we need to ask therefore is whether such regenerative approaches can ever be replicated at scale, and if so, can some of the benefits still be retained within the local community?

Market matters

Despite commendable efforts by certain businesses to support farmers on their regenerative journey, including by paying a premium for their output, the market as a whole still incentivises specialisation, standardisation and efficiency (low cost). This in turn drives the high-intensity, high-input farming practices that have been a feature of our food system since the end of the Second World War and have caused huge harm to our natural environment.

Farmers shouldn’t be blamed for responding to market signals. It takes a brave farmer with a high appetite for risk to buck the trend and move from a modern conventional system to the kind of regenerative system that would have been familiar to their ancestors. As Cambridgeshire arable farmer and Wildfarmed grower, David White, told me: “When I started doing what I’m doing it looked initially as though the farm had been abandoned and I had to field all kinds of difficult questions from local people who walked the footpaths because it didn’t appear that I was farming the land at all.”

If more farmers are to be persuaded to adopt regenerative principles (as well as other more nature-friendly systems like organic and agroecological) it will need buyers to act as enablers of the transition from conventional farming rather than impediments to it.

That almost certainly requires a shift away from business as usual and a fixation with spreadsheets, specifications and standards, to a more collaborative approach that provides farmers with the opportunity to de-risk the transition to regenerative agriculture by paying them a fair price for their produce and giving them long-term certainty of supply.

Procurement models will need to evolve too with a greater focus on regional purchasing and decentralised infrastructure, and an openness to purchase more than one food from any one farm where the farmer has diversified in order to build ecological resilience (integrating livestock into cereal production, for example, or adding legumes to an arable rotation).

When I asked Patrick Barker from the High Suffolk Farm Cluster what he wants to hear from businesses who express a desire to support regenerative farming his response was: “How do we share risk and how do we value what doesn’t have financial value? Things like clean air, clean water and biodiversity: how do we add value to those sorts of things that the market doesn’t currently value?”

This represents a big philosophical and strategic shift for the majority of businesses who have long taken ecosystem services for granted. As a starting point it requires decision makers – and not just sustainability teams – to be prepared to get closer to farms and understand the needs and motivations of those producing their ingredients.

Spend a morning with Tom Morphew and you’ll come away with the conviction that creating a better food system is possible.

It’s up to businesses to start making the possible a reality.

The new Footprint Intelligence report – Unlocking the community benefits of regenerative agriculture from field to fork, in association with Nestlé Professional – can be downloaded for free here.