The two organizations partner to launch Journey to ROC
Regenerative Organic Alliance/RegenAgri
Widely implementing regenerative agriculture around the world is imperative for the future of our food system. Farming the way nature intended is proof that growing our food can mitigate environmental and health risks. But several challenges impede its progress.
The Regenerative Organic Alliance–also known as ROC–is taking a bold stance against those challenges by kickstarting a new program, Journey to ROC, to welcome and encourage more farmers and packaged food brands to implement regenerative agriculture practices.
“This is a major step forward for the global regenerative organic movement,” Christopher Gergen, CEO of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, tells me.
Journey to ROC is a partnership between ROC and RegenAgri, another regenerative certifier that has less rigorous standards. Farms and brands that want to achieve ROC Certification but have not yet met its high threshold will have the opportunity to become RegenAgri certified to encourage them to keep continually improving their land, eventually graduating to ROC Certification within three to five years.
“Farmers start their regenerative organic journeys from a lot of different places depending on their current agricultural practices,” Franco Costantini, RegenAgri CEO, tells me. “We need to meet the farmers where they are.”
While it’s important to keep standards high so that the term ‘regenerative’ maintains its integrity, the Regenerative Organic Alliance, the most rigorous of about a dozen regenerative agriculture seals in the marketplace, has faced criticism for its high threshold for certification, which includes a baseline of organic farming. Farms and food brands who may not meet those standards often find other organizations to grant certification, or have decided that regenerative agriculture may be impractical for them altogether. “We’ve got brands that want to get their supply chains on this path, and we never had a good answer for it. That that left open the door of them going to a substandard verification,” Gergen says. “Now we’ve mitigated that.”
The new program is born out of that tension–between high standards and encouraging more farms to implement regenerative practices. Now, instead of farms and CPG brands having to look elsewhere if they don’t meet ROC’s standards, they can remain in the ROC family, which has a marketplace association with being the gold standard.
“The challenge with regenerative claims is that so many of them lack any clearly-defined standard and are not third-party verified,” Gergen says. “Journey to ROC is a clear, high-integrity pathway to ROC through the path of soil health, with a credible third-party-verified standard like RegenAgri.”
It took diligent efforts for ROC to find a partner it felt comfortable associating itself with. Collecting third-party verified data on farms was one non-negotiable factor ROC looked for in a partner, so organizations like Regenified, which does not conduct third-party audits, were not considered. “We needed to make sure that it was of the equivalent quality and transparency of our standard. RegenAgri fits that bill,” Gergen says. “They’ve got very rigorous, transparent standards for soil health and animal welfare.”
One primary difference between the two organizations is that RegenAgri does not require organic farming to obtain its certification. “Organic is very important, but we also know that there are many farms that cannot be,” Costantini says. “If you are not able to bring farms into the system, they will find it much more challenging to achieve that target.” RegenAgri does have some certified farms that are organic, but may not meet other soil health, animal welfare or social fairness pillars. Farms can begin the Journey to ROC program by meeting at least one pillar before finally implementing all three and must obtain organic certification in the process.
ROC Certification is a black belt. Journey to ROC and RegenAgri are the different colored belts that act as incentives to help farmers achieve that goal.
“The incentive is the market signal that people have recognized ROC Certification as the highest standard. They are demanding more of it and are willing to pay a premium,” says Gergen.
The Journey to ROC program makes it so that farms don’t have to get re-audited once graduating to ROC status. But that’s really not a destination; regenerative agriculture itself is not a destination. Demonstrating continual improvement is one of the backbones of this method of farming, which even ROC Certified farms must always prove year after year.
ROC needs to maintain the image of its extremely high standard, so brands that are in the Journey to ROC program, given that they have not met those high standards, will not be able to showcase any ROC stamp on its packaging. Those brands will receive a RegenAgri stamp. It’ll provide important visibility to RegenAgri, which at the moment only has about 30 CPG brands certified.
On the other hand, in five years since inception, RegenAgri has certified more than 300,000 farms around the world. That global recognition was a big draw for ROC as it works to expand its footprint outside of the US. ROC will be able to tap into those resources. Gergen points to tens of thousands of RegenAgri Certified cotton farmers in Tanzania who he hopes to become ROC Certified soon. RegenAgri is more dominant in regenerative textiles, another area that ROC is working to build up, making RegenAgri an attractive partner. ROC has a five year goal of adding 100 ROC Certified brands in Europe made with ingredients from European ROC Certified farms. It is also looking for a handful of farms within the next year to be a part of the pilot program, which includes finding CPG brand partners to help create markets and offset transition costs.
The Regenerative Organic Alliance, which was formed in partnership with the Rodale Institute in 2017, stands firm in its stance of requiring a baseline of organic farming to be considered regenerative. The ROA and RegenAgri do not have plans to merge into one organization but will start to work much closer with one another. “This goes beyond just certifying farms,” Costantini says. “It creates a framework with brands, helping us and ROC to generate support, drive demand and increase the value of products.”
The two organizations will also begin a data-sharing partnership, which is one benefit of RegenAgri, given that both organizations are practice- and outcome-based, meaning that the practices being implemented on a farm are just as important as how farmers achieve positive outcomes. “We need to know what is being done and what is achieved in such a way that we know what’s working, what’s not working and where we see more impact,” Costantini says. “Our standards provide guidance, assurance, consistent ways of quantifying and reporting impact coming from regenerative farming.”
RegenAgri is not an accepted regenerative certification for a front-of-package claim at the nation’s largest natural grocer, Whole Foods Market, which helped establish USDA Organic guidelines in the 2000s. It’s still unclear if Whole Foods, in light of this new initiative, will add RegenAgri to that list.
The plethora of regenerative agriculture certifications is adding consumer confusion, when that’s the complete opposite of what a certification should do. Educating consumers on the basics of regenerative agriculture is already a challenge, yet its a challenge that must be taken on. “If we can get a number of these high quality standards working with one another through this equivalency process…” Gergen says, “…it will become easier for farmers and a lot more straightforward for the industry.”
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