The Transition Period: Challenges & Opportunities
Why Is Regenerative Agriculture Still Marginal?
Regenerative agriculture has deep roots in the history of Indigenous land use and, in the face of climate change, its ecological benefits are more important than ever. Yet despite increasing interest, it remains far from widespread. Why?
Regeneration resists singular solutions, but there are four key areas that impact this transition:
1. Social Confidence & Cultural Support Many farmers face social pressure when deviating from conventional practices. For younger generations, choosing regenerative agriculture practices can be read as a critique of their elders. “When you say it’s better for the land or for people,” Dieter van den Broeck, Design Strategist & Facilitator at Commonland, explains, “it implies what came before was harmful—which can be very hard to accept.”⁵⁶
2. Knowledge & Skill Development Decades of industrial agriculture have transformed farming into a largely mechanized process, where tasks are performed by machines, data, and chemicals rather than by human attention to the land. Regenerative practices require different tools and place-based skills that need to be learned or relearned.
3. Access to Land Regenerative agriculture is a long-term investment requiring access to land for decades, not seasons, in order to maximize carbon sequestration, watershed health, and biodiversity. In many regions, however, access to land remains a structural barrier. Addressing this challenge calls for a global reevaluation of policy environments and land tenure systems that often perpetuate the commodification of land rather than ensuring it remains in the hands of Indigenous people and farmers. In the United States for example, an estimated 400 million acres of farmland will change hands in the next fifteen years as the average age of US farmers reaches 60 years old.⁵⁷ While US nonprofits like the Agrarian Trust and The Farmers Land Trust are dedicated to protecting land at risk of buyouts from investment firms, global solutions must be rooted in place to ensure next-generation farmers can maintain stewardship of their land and therefore commit to long-term regenerative practices.
“This isn’t just about paying a premium—it’s about meaningful recognition for the farmers who are going above and beyond to steward land and ecosystems responsibly.”⁶⁰
Felipe Urioste, Director, Land to Market
4. Economic Transition Support Perhaps the greatest barrier is financial. Farmland prices have risen over 68% since 2007,⁵⁸ affecting farmers of color in particular, who make up 80% of farmworkers yet own less than 2% of US farmland.⁵⁷ Transitioning to regenerative systems often requires 3–7 years of rebuilding soil health, during which yields may drop and inputs shift.⁵⁹
Farmers face a double hardship of lower income and higher investment needs that must be supported through long-term and patient investment capital so that the financial burden of this shift does not fall solely on them.
How Brands Can Support the Transition to Regenerative Agriculture
Brands must recognize that regeneration isn’t just about soil and carbon—it’s about equity, livelihood, and long-term partnership—and price models need to be adjusted to reflect that.
“The farm remains the most vulnerable part of the supply chain. Farmers are navigating a particularly delicate moment. Unless we rethink how value is distributed across the chain, we risk compromising the long-term resilience and continuity of supply that many take for granted.”⁶⁰
Felipe Urioste
Brands that want to support this transition must meet farmers at the root of the supply chain—not just with expectations, but with respect, long-term commitments, financial support, and farm visits to establish visibility. The Organic Cotton Accelerator (OCA) offers an example of this in action: In 2023, the number of in-conversion farmers in OCA’s Farm Program increased by 90%, reaching nearly 36,000 farmers.⁶¹ With the participation of over 50 brand partners and contributors, OCA created secure off-take agreements, provided organic inputs and training, and delivered over $4.8 million in premiums to farmers.⁶¹
Question of Scalability
When asked if regenerative agriculture is scalable for a fashion company, Dieter van den Broeck responded, “I think this is the wrong question. I think what they should be asking is: will conventional agriculture still be sustainable for us in 10 years time? . . . The question around the scalability of regenerative agriculture should be: how can we, as a company, do that more, because that’s the only way that we are going to survive as
a company.”⁵⁶
Reframing the question this way shifts attitudes from doubtful to an open, nonjudgmental perspective that acknowledges we have to do this. The key to scaling without losing a sense of place is to respect that regeneration is always local—but systems of support, verification, and sourcing can be regional, national, or global in design. We must collectively ask: How can we become regenerative together, without losing touch with locality, and without causing harm, greenwashing for profit, or excluding marginal voices?
Some practices that support scaling regenerative agriculture can include:
Funding regeneration where you can’t yet source. Through funding and partnerships, fashion brands can play a pivotal role in their farms’ transition period toward regenerative methods.
Pre-planting and pre-shearing contracts, allowing farmers to have more security in moving toward regeneration, are essential for reconnecting fashion to place.
Brands can bring consumers into a relationship with place through storytelling, highlighting the specific ecosystems communities, and traditions behind a garment.
Place-based design standards, frameworks, or certifications prioritize regional materials, community benefits, and soil health.
Investing in regional milling, spinning, and dyeing infrastructure allows locally grown fibers to remain in their region—preserving identity, reducing emissions, and enabling scalable traceability.
“It’s a stalemate. The financiers won’t invest until supply increases. Brands won’t commit until supply increases. And supply won’t increase without investment.”²⁷
Stacy Flynn, Co-Founder & CEO, Evrnu
Shifting from Anthropocentric to Earth-Centric Design
Regenerative design can support a paradigm shift toward holistic change. While anthropocentric design is limited to either sustainable or circular design, Earth-centric design combines circular and regenerative methodology to benefit all interconnected living systems.
Anthropocentric Design
Sustainable Design
Focus On
Minimizing impact often still relying on a linear economic model
Earth-Centric Design
Circular & Regenerative Design Focus On
Positive/restorative impact on biosphere and communities
Holistic designing for a more than human world
Proactive regeneration
Circular Design
Focus On
Circular material flow
Removal of toxic processes
Passive regeneration
Source Stenton, M. (n.d.). Transient fashion: A transdisciplinary framework for developing casein-based materials within a regenerative textile economy [Master’s thesis, University of the Arts London]. https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/22423/2/Stenton%2CS%2C%20MS%20FInal%20Thesis%20Submission.pdf
Fashion-Wide Landscape Thinking
Drawing on a case from South Africa, Dieter van den Broeck describes how an insurance company realized that restoring ecological health across an entire catchment was in their long-term financial interest. But no single company could fund the necessary transformation alone. “Fire doesn’t stop at the boundary of your farm. A drought doesn’t stop at your fence.”⁵⁶
Likewise, no single fashion brand owns an entire region’s fiber production. True regenerative impact, then, requires collective action—across brands, sectors, and supply chains. “When the fashion industry really wants to start addressing this,” van den Broeck argues, “it needs fashion-wide landscape thinking.”⁵⁶
While regenerative agriculture delivers measurable ecological benefits—such as a 143% increase in soil organic carbon in just three years for one early adopter⁴⁴—these gains depend on more than good land stewardship alone. They require sustained investment, risk sharing, and market alignment.
“A brand can say, ‘I’m now only buying organic cotton.’ Great. But that’s almost unfair—because they’ve been buying conventional cotton for years. People built a lifestyle around that. Now you're asking them to change, but you're not sharing the risk.”⁵⁶
Dieter van den Broeck, Design Strategist & Facilitator, Commonland
Brands play a pivotal role in making regenerative supply chains viable—not just by sourcing regeneratively grown fibers, but by investing upstream, building long-term partnerships with growers, and helping create the market conditions and designs necessary for these practices to scale. Integration means going beyond storytelling and certifications; it means shouldering shared responsibility for the transition to regenerative systems.
“There’s such a big upfront cost to regenerative practices, and not every grower has the resources to just experiment. That’s why it’s so important that brands aren’t just demanding regenerative cotton—they need to help create the infrastructure and the market for it.”⁴⁴
Nica Rabinowitz, Climate Beneficial/Fibershed
How Can Brands Help Move Regenerative Design as a Movement Forward?
While policy change is key, brands and their designers have the unique ability to act now and lead this movement by example. If brands acknowledge and address overproduction through long-term commitments to regenerative practices—not a one-off marketing campaign or single regenerative product—they can then inspire consumers to challenge overconsumption and embrace more intentional clothing purchasing habits. Brand transparency can also help bridge the information gap that prevents people from matching their values with their clothing purchases. This includes offering digestible, engaging information on the difference between conventional, organic, and regenerative materials as well as sharing supply chain stories—where the materials are made, who makes them, and why it matters.
Pricing, however, remains a major barrier for customers to be able to buy products that align with their values.
“If buying clothes for a ten-year time frame sounds expensive, that’s because it is. But it doesn’t mean you need to spend more money on clothes; it’s about apportioning the money you already spend differently.”⁶²
Lucianne Tonti, Sundressed
Brands and designers can help reframe why and how often consumers buy clothes with collections that reflect a quality over quantity philosophy—and make secondhand options available at a lower price point to maximize accessibility. Sharing the true cost of regeneration is also key so customers understand the value behind higher price points. The Slow Label, for example, offers price breakdowns behind their products, from the materials and labor cost to the company markup. This can help foster purpose-driven purchases and deeper attachment between the garment and the wearer—as well as a renewed value for repair and care to ensure the greatest return on each investment piece.
“So I buy bread, and the next time it tastes the same, and the next time it tastes the same—that kind of bluntness of our experience . . . they needed to start training their customers: yes, you buy the same bread, but it’s always going to be a bit different.”⁵⁶
Dieter van den Broeck
Regenerative models—whether in farming, textiles, or food—also require changed consumer expectations. Industrial production has made uniformity our standard. But regeneration, by nature, resists sameness. It embraces change, seasonality, and the unpredictability of life. Organic cotton and natural dyes, for example, will always have slight variations in their colors and textures. Instead of seeing this as a flaw, these differences can be celebrated and marketed by brands as signs of ecological vitality.