After many years working in finance and commercial strategy before becoming a farmer, the first thing I do when I encounter a regenerative project I’m excited about is run the numbers in my head.
Where are their margins coming from? What is driving their revenue? Is this financially sustainable?
I don’t do this to question the movement. I do it because, deep down, my dream is to see regenerative projects scale beyond niche markets. Right now, that doesn’t seem easy.
I remember having a conversation with someone who also worked for a large food company in the agriculture department. I still remember the cold-shower sentence: “Regenerative agriculture is for billionaires who want to feel good about themselves.”
I remember feeling physically sick hearing that. If that is the mentality, how do we ever change the system from the inside?
The truth is, when you are deep in the corporate food world, your mind starts operating purely on costs, margins, and revenue. Disconnected from nature, sustainability becomes a beautiful word at the end of a slide deck, often rebranded as ESG, which half of the audience doesn’t fully understand.
The drive for growth is endless. Expectations keep rising. You squeeze every ounce out of an Excel sheet to generate more revenue. Meetings to plan other meetings. Endless strategy sessions calculating futures that may never materialize, while reality keeps unfolding outside the spreadsheet.
As I moved between both worlds simultaneously, farming on weekends and working in a fast-moving consumer goods company during the week, I began to understand something important:
Regenerative projects do not fail because they are weak.
They struggle because our food system rewards volume efficiency, not ecosystem health.
While regenerative and organic farmers promote long-term resilience, soil fertility, biodiversity, water retention, and carbon sequestration, the food sector rewards appearance, yield, shelf stability, and logistical efficiency.
Regenerative agriculture embraces diversity, seasonality, and variability.
Retail systems demand predictability, standardization, and volume continuity.
From a biological and ecological perspective, regenerative systems work. They are increasingly recognized as one of the few viable long-term paths forward. Regenerative soil practices have shown higher drought resilience, lower fertilizer dependency, and greater stability across climate shocks.
But can they survive inside an economic model that was never designed to reward them?
Traditional financial models struggle to understand diversified farming systems because they were designed to measure linear production, not living ecosystems.
Take syntropic agriculture, developed by Ernst Götsch. The model mimics forest succession through multilayer cropping systems that generate continuous biomass, that feeds soil life, while reducing dependency on external inputs.
Environmentally, it is extraordinarily efficient.
Commercially, it struggles to enter conventional markets.
These systems generate value through multiple products across time, but often fail to deliver the volume consistency retailers expect.
One of the most promising models I have observed is cooperatives. The last coffee I bought in a supermarket came from a women-led cooperative representing more than 20,000 growers. When farmers unite, they gain negotiation power, reduce distribution costs, and expand market access.
Cooperative models reveal something important: regeneration is also an economic coordination challenge.
Regenerative agriculture asks us to think in cycles instead of quarters and in ecosystems instead of supply chains. Closing the gap between regeneration and profitability requires rethinking how value is measured across the entire food chain.
And that is uncomfortable for a system built on predictability and speed.
The question is not whether regenerative agriculture can produce food. It already does.
The real question is whether our economic models are capable of valuing what regenerative systems actually produce.
Having lived inside both worlds, I no longer see finance and regeneration as opposing forces. I see them as two languages that have not yet learned how to translate each other.
We are not trying to replace one system overnight.
We are trying to redesign how value itself is defined.
That alone is already bold.
Rachel Dias is a farmer and land steward working at the intersection of soil, food, and story. Her work bridges regenerative agriculture, ancestral knowledge, and contemporary systems thinking, exploring how we can build rooted futures in a rapidly changing world. Follow her writing on Substack.