What’s With All the Certifications? Part Two: Regenerative Agriculture

Organic is the floor at Rootstock. Our farms aim higher.

In Part One, we looked closely at organic certification—a system with genuine force of law behind it, requiring yearly inspections, and far rarer than the ubiquitous green sticker would suggest. It's the best tool we have for keeping synthetic pesticides and prohibited inputs out of our food, but it has some real blind spots.

What does aiming higher look like? Our growers have taken up something broader and harder to pin down: regenerative agriculture—an approach built less on avoiding harm than on actively rebuilding the soil and the ecosystems our food depends on.

Why does regenerative agriculture matter? 

Food systems sit at the center of today’s biggest challenges. They account for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and by 2050 we’ll need about 60% more food to feed a growing global population. The challenge is not only how to grow more food, but how to do so while protecting the soil, water, biodiversity, and communities that make agriculture possible in the first place.

Regenerative agriculture offers a path forward. Switching over takes time and money, but the investment can pay off. By cutting their dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, regenerative farms often spend far less on inputs—in one peer-reviewed study, just 12% of gross income versus 32% on conventional farms—which translated into 78% higher profits. And the advantage compounds: conventional systems can quietly draw down the very soil they depend on, while regenerative ones rebuild it—helping secure resilience and harvests for generations to come.

At its core, the idea is almost stubbornly simple: take care of the soil, and the soil takes better care of everything else—plants, animals, water, and people. It isn’t new, either. More than a century ago, George Washington Carver was preaching crop diversity and soil restoration. Decades later, Robert Rodale and the Rodale Institute popularized the phrase “regenerative organic” to describe farming designed not merely to sustain the land but to restore it. What's new is the momentum behind it—still a tiny slice of all farming, but a fast-growing one, and more shoppers are starting to look for it.

What does it look like?

There’s no single approach. Most regenerative farms combine practices: cover cropping to keep soil protected between seasons, crop rotation to build fertility and break pest cycles, reduced or minimal tillage to leave the soil intact, compost and organic matter to feed the life underground, managed grazing that puts livestock to work, hedgerows and diverse plantings to invite wildlife back in. Researchers have linked these methods to stronger biodiversity, healthier ecosystems, and—in some cases—better productivity. Frameworks like the Regen10 Outcomes model try to tie these practices to the bigger picture: water quality, climate resilience, and farmer livelihoods.

 

There is no universal definition of what counts as “regenerative,” in part because it has to be context specific. The practices that work in Watsonville's berry fields may look very different from those on a Midwestern grain farm or a smallholder farm in Africa. This also means it is hard to say how many farms, here or globally, truly qualify—there isn’t one agreed-upon number. 

How widespread is it?

As important as regenerative farming is, it's still a small fraction of agriculture overall. Of the roughly 880 million acres of U.S. farmland, only about 4.9 million are certified organic—well under 1%. Certified regenerative land is smaller still: harder to pin down, but only a sliver of even that organic acreage here in the U.S. Globally, though, the trend is unmistakable. Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC), the standard built on top of organic, has gone from under a million acres in 2021 to more than 20 million worldwide today—across 500-plus farms and ranches and tens of thousands of smallholders.

How does certification work?

The goal of certification is to turn a fuzzy ideal into something measurable and verifiable. Developed by the Regenerative Organic Alliance, ROC adds requirements for soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness to the organic baseline. As with organic, it isn’t a one-time stamp. Farms typically begin with assessments and multi-year transition periods, then commit to ongoing inspections and verification. The fees come in layers: an initial application of $350 to $1,000 depending on farm size and structure, a flat $300 certification fee, and annual renewals of $250 to $500—plus the cost of the audit itself, billed separately by an independent certifying body. Brands selling ROC products pay an additional licensing fee pegged to a small percentage of sales. All told, the yearly cost runs from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. 

ROC is just one of several regenerative labels—Regenified, the Real Organic Project, and A Greener World's Certified Regenerative among them—in a space that's still taking shape. The standards are still maturing, and most shoppers aren't yet asking for—or paying extra for—a seal. So plenty of excellent farms are choosing to do the work without paying to prove it.

What are Rootstock farms doing?

This isn't abstract for us. A few of our partners have gone all the way to ROC certification—Burroughs Family Farms in Denair, who grow the almonds, almond butter, and olive oil in our store, is certified by the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Others simply do the work. Full Belly Farm builds its soil with cover crops, compost, and reduced tillage across more than 80 crops. Swanton Berry Farm became the first organic farm in the country to sign a union contract with the United Farm Workers, back in 1998, and still pays hourly wages and offers low-cost housing to a crew that stays for years. Fifth Crow Farm, diversified across 150 acres in Pescadero, partners with land trusts to preserve farmland and works pasture-raised hens into its pest control. Oya Organics runs on shared decision-making and profit-sharing among everyone who works the land. Each is chasing the same things—healthier soil, a living ecosystem, and a fair deal for the people in the field—whether or not a certificate hangs on the wall.

And that’s the thread running through both halves of this story. Certification, organic or regenerative, was never really about the label. It’s a long-term investment in the health of the systems that grow our food—the practices and the years of patient soil-building that go into a single outstanding strawberry. 

You can taste it in every Rootstock delivery—and every order helps make more of it possible.

When farms thrive, we thrive. Thank you for being part of it.p

 

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Sources

• Rodale, R. (1983). "Breaking New Ground: The Search for a Sustainable Agriculture." Futurist 17, 15–20.

• Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D., et al. (2021). "Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions." Nature Food 2, 198–209.

• United Nations, "Feeding the World Sustainably" (≈60% more food needed by 2050), UN Chronicle: https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/feeding-world-sustainably

• LaCanne, C.E., Lundgren, J.G. (2018). "Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably." PeerJ 6:e4428: https://peerj.com/articles/4428/

• Newton, P., Civita, N., Frankel-Goldwater, L., Bartel, K., Johns, C. (2020). "What Is Regenerative Agriculture? A Review of Scholar and Practitioner Definitions Based on Processes and Outcomes." Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 4:577723.

• Hounkpatin, K.O.L., De Giorgi, E., Jalava, M., Poelert, J., West, P.C., Kummu, M. (2026). "Where regenerative farming practices could increase yields: a global assessment." npj Sustain. Agric. 4, 26.

• Regen10 Outcomes Framework, 2026: https://framework.regen10.org/

• Regenerative Organic Alliance, "Our Impact to Date" (certified acres, farms, and smallholders), 2026: https://regenorganic.org/

• 100 Million Acres, "Why Certified Regenerative?" (certified acreage growth, 2021–2025): https://100millionacres.org/why-regenerative/

• Regenerative Organic Alliance, "Why Regenerative Organic?" (certification pillars): https://regenorganic.org/why-regenerative-organic/

• Regenerative Organic Certified Cost & Fee Structure, Version 6.0, effective April 1, 2026: https://regenorganic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ROC_Cost_and_Fee_Structure.pdf