The regenerative movement has the momentum. Now it needs to scale.
Reflections on Groundswell from the CBA’s Director of Strategic Relations and Membership, Katie McCoshan
At the beginning of July the CBA’s CEO Marc Palahí and I spent two days at Groundswell – the regenerative agriculture festival held at Lannock Farm in Hertfordshire – which was celebrating its tenth anniversary. We came away energised and inspired. Walking the fields at Groundswell isn’t like sitting in a conference centre; you’re standing in the middle of the thing you’re trying to build, surrounded by the people actually building it.
For CBA, it was also a chance to test our thinking. Earlier this year we hosted a roundtable on scaling regenerative food systems which identified promising steps to accelerate progress, including how to build a coordinated market commitment and living labs to support the transition in particularly challenging value chains. Talking to farmers, NGOs, retailers and investors at the conference we kept circling back to the same questions and challenges. And it’s clear there’s real appetite to keep pushing on them together, which is exactly what we intend to do over the rest of this year.
Why now matters. This year’s Groundswell landed at a pointed moment for UK agriculture. June 2026 brought a second heatwave of the year, pushing water demand up sharply. Some reservoirs are already down to 50–60% capacity and meteorologists are predicting a strong El Niño event for the rest of 2026, which could disrupt farming in the UK as well as disrupting international food supply chains. Resilient, regenerative agricultural systems are rapidly becoming an economic and food security imperative.
Three things stood out from the discussions as needing the most attention next:
Long-term offtake and procurement. Retailers and manufacturers hold real power here, and some are already using it. Waitrose has committed that by 2035, all its own-brand UK meat, milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables and horticulture will come from farms using regenerative practices. Nestlé’s recent move to source regenerative Wildfarmed wheat for its UK KitKat production shows the same logic reaching further into everyday supply chains. The open question at Groundswell wasn’t whether this matters, but who’s going to follow. That’s precisely the gap our own work is now looking at.
Shared methods for a science-based transition. There was strong consensus that regenerative agriculture is a journey. We should be talking about principles, not prescribed practices, and measuring continuous improvement. Organisations like the Sustainable Food Trust and the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture are doing important work to build a harmonised approach. A critical point is that shared frameworks can’t come at farmers’ expense. If we’re asking them to collect data, the cost of doing so has to be shared, not passed down the chain. Harmonisation has to come with funded support for the people generating the evidence, not just a common template for using it.
Knowledge and education. The sheer number of packed tents and workshops at Groundswell shows how much is already happening – the challenge now is scaling agronomic support so it reaches far more producers and farmers, not just the most connected ones.
Groundswell was a reminder that scaling regenerative agrifood systems will only succeed through collaboration and holistic thinking. There is a real movement and momentum and we’re keen to keep learning and convening key players to deliver a transition that is nature-positive, economically viable and resilient.
Find out more
Scaling the circular bioeconomy: Unlocking Regenerative Agri-Food Systems
