SAI Platform says its Regenerating Together Program will help food companies define, measure and verify regenerative agriculture across supply chains
A Geneva-based group unveiled a global regenerative agriculture verification program in Saskatoon in June.
The Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform officially launched its Regenerating Together Program (RTP) during its annual members-only conference. While the main sessions were held in Saskatoon, delegates toured farms and agricultural sites around the province.
The program’s roots go back to 2023, when SAI first announced its RTP framework and definition for regenerative agriculture.
The framework represents the latest effort to answer one of agriculture’s lingering questions: what exactly counts as regenerative agriculture?
Unlike organic production, regenerative agriculture has evolved largely as a farmer-led movement without a formal definition or set of required practices. That flexibility has helped it spread across different climates and production systems.
As regenerative agriculture gained a public reputation as a forward-looking, environmentally friendly approach to farming, it has become increasingly attractive to food companies wanting to tie themselves to the concept. However, that’s been difficult to do because of the lack of certainty around how to define it, measure it or back up claims.
Read Also
Several organizations have attempted to fill that gap. Certification programs such as Regenified and Land to Market offer third-party verification, while companiesm including McCain Foods, have developed regenerative agriculture programs within their own supply chains.
SAI says its program takes a different approach.
Rather than prescribing specific farming practices, the framework is built around environmental outcomes. Farmers are expected to choose practices that fit their own operations while demonstrating progress toward goals related to soil health, water, biodiversity and climate resilience.
“The framework allows for diversity,” said Dionys Forster, director general of SAI Platform.
“It was important to keep the toolbox as complete as possible so farmers can pick what best fits their operations.”
He said that flexibility matters in regions with short growing seasons and limited moisture, where practices such as cover cropping may not fit as easily as they do elsewhere.
“How do you grow a cover crop in that context? You need to find other ways,” he said.
Not an on-pack label
Forster said the objective is not to create another consumer-facing certification label but to help businesses align regenerative agriculture efforts throughout their supply chains.
“People often think about certification as something that ends up on a package,” he said.
“That’s not what we’re trying to do.”
Instead, RTP functions as a business-to-business verification framework.
According to SAI Platform, participating companies can make claims about their regenerative agriculture commitments and implementation. However, they are not able to include consumer-facing on-pack claims or environmental impact claims.
Verification is based on farm-management systems and sampling rather than certifying every farm or product individually, an approach the organization says keeps the process affordable while maintaining credibility.
More than 40 food and agriculture companies, including Nestlé, McCain Foods, Louis Dreyfus Company and Diageo, have signed a declaration supporting the program.
Forster said the interest from those companies is not only about sustainability targets but also about the long-term stability of the farms and supply chains on which they depend.
“The food and beverage industry has realized it’s about resilience, and it’s about resilient supply chains,” he said.
Reading between the buzzwords
For farmer organizations, however, the emergence of industry frameworks raises questions about what that means for farmers in the field.
Duncan Morrison, executive director of the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association, said efforts to define regenerative agriculture were probably inevitable as the movement gained momentum.
“That’s probably a step in the process that we all saw coming at some point,” he said.
Morrison said farmer interest is likely to depend on whether such programs remain truly flexible, adding that frameworks that avoid prescribing individual practices can still become prescriptive if the desired outcomes are defined too narrowly.
Morrison said “outcome-based” sounds great on paper, but it has become a buzzword in regenerative agriculture.
“Outcomes implies that there’s an equation upstream. What are those outcomes? Who’s declaring that?”
At the same time, Morrison stressed that his organization is not opposed to initiatives such as RTP. However, as a farmer-led organization, Morrison said there must be something in it for producers.
He pointed to the years regenerative farmers have spent developing practices that improve soil health, biodiversity and resilience, often without widespread recognition. As interest from food companies grows, he sees value in frameworks that acknowledge those efforts, provided they continue to reflect farm realities.
Forster said that his group is chasing the same goal. Its intent is to help companies recognize the value farmers create when they adopt practices that support more resilient supply chains.
“We need to work together along the value chain so that farmers can be acknowledged and, if possible, rewarded for what they have been doing,” he said.
Morrison said the attention from groups such as SAI can also be encouraging for farmers who have spent years experimenting with regenerative practices without always getting much recognition. Many are already seeing results on their own farms, he said, and outside interest can feel like a sign that others are finally catching up.
“They’re starting to shift that mindset from where they’re at the back of the bus to where now groups like SAI want them at the front of the bus,” he said.
Still, Morrison said participation in any regenerative agriculture verification program will ultimately come down to individual producers.
“That’s a farmgate-by-farmgate decision,” he said.