By Artem Milinchuk, Founder & Head of Strategy, FarmTogether, a farmland investment manager

A new documentary is making the rounds. Groundswell — the third chapter in the trilogy
that began with Kiss the Ground — premiered at Cannes in May and launched on Amazon
Prime on World Environment Day (this past Friday, June 5th). Narrated by Demi Moore and
Woody Harrelson, I found it sweeping, cinematic, and genuinely compelling. It covers five
continents and makes a case for regenerative agriculture as a solution to soil loss, biodiversity
collapse, and climate change.

I watched it. I think investors should watch it, too. But not primarily for the reasons the
filmmakers intend.

At FarmTogether, we have spent nearly a decade building a platform that gives investors
direct access to U.S. farmland — evaluating deals across states, crops, and investment
structures, with a rigorous underwriting process that accepts fewer than 1% of opportunities
we review. Regenerative agriculture has become an increasingly central part of how we think
about asset quality — not because we are sustainability advocates, but because we have
looked at the data and concluded that conventional farming carries compounding,
underpriced risk.

This is not an ESG story. This is a risk management story.

The Cocoa Wake-Up Call

Let me start with cocoa — the raw agricultural commodity behind chocolate — because it is
the clearest recent example of what climate-driven supply failure actually looks like at scale.

In 2024, cocoa futures surged from roughly $2,500 to over $10,000 per metric ton — levels not
seen since the 1970s. The cause was not a financial shock nor a geopolitical disruption. It was
weather. West Africa, which produces roughly 70% of the world’s cocoa, was hit by extreme
heat and erratic rainfall, causing widespread crop failure and disease. Ghana cut its crop
forecast by 40%. Global inventories hit a 45-year low.

The broader point: a single-season climate event in one region triggered a price spike of over
136% in one of the world’s most consumed commodities. Food manufacturers scrambled.
Supply chains seized. And the underlying conditions — depleted soils, aging trees,
monoculture dependence — had been building quietly for years.

Cocoa is not an isolated example. It is a preview.

The Yield Risk That Most Ag Investors Aren’t Pricing

BCG’s modeling, published in late 2025, is stark: global production of major crops —
representing 65% of global output and 70% of global caloric intake — could decline by up to
35% by 2050 due to rising temperatures and erratic weather. We are talking about wheat,
corn, rice, and soy. The staples.

The mechanism is well understood: conventional agriculture systematically degrades the soil
it depends on. Tillage, synthetic inputs, and monoculture rotations erode organic matter,
reduce water retention, and make cropland progressively more vulnerable to drought and
heat stress.

What Regenerative Practices Actually Do for a Portfolio

Here is where the conversation shifts from macro risk to practical investment thesis.

Regenerative agriculture — cover cropping, reduced tillage, diverse rotations, integrated
livestock, soil health management — is not an ideological program. It is a set of practices with
measurable agronomic and financial outcomes. A hyper long 30-year Michigan State
University study found that no-till crop yields improve consistently over time driven by higher
soil organic matter and moisture retention. Diversified rotations compound that effect,
reducing yield losses during adverse conditions and producing more consistent output
quality.

On the cost side, the mechanism is straightforward: as soil health improves, it does more of
the work that synthetic inputs currently perform. Cover cropping and compost application
build natural fertility over time, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers. Diverse rotations
and integrated pest management disrupt pest and disease cycles naturally, lowering
herbicide and pesticide use. The result, for farms that have completed the transition, is a
meaningfully lower and more stable input cost structure — which improves margin resilience
precisely when commodity prices are most volatile.

The transition period deserves honest accounting. BCG and WBCSD research finds that
farmers can expect up to $40 per acre in profitability impact during the three-to-five-year
transition window, due to yield adjustment and capital outlays. This “entry price” is precisely
where institutional capital can play a structuring role and where patient, knowledgeable
investors gain an advantage over those who treat transition cost as a disqualifier rather than
an entry point.

Post-transition, the same research identifies a 15–25% return on investment for farmers who
have successfully shifted to regenerative systems — driven by input cost reduction, yield
stabilization, and increasingly, price premiums from supply chain buyers who need verifiable
resilience.

The Measurement Problem — and Why It’s Being Solved

The most common objection I hear from investors is not about the thesis. It is about
verification. How do you actually measure whether a farm is regenerative? How do you
underwrite something you cannot reliably quantify?

It is a fair question, and it has historically been a genuine barrier. But the data infrastructure is
maturing. Soil health monitoring technology, satellite-based carbon measurement, and
third-party certification frameworks are all advancing rapidly. At FarmTogether, we evaluate
regenerative practices as part of our broader asset quality assessment — examining soil
organic matter trajectories, water retention indicators, input cost trends, and rotation diversity
alongside conventional financial metrics.

Our agricultural operations are certified to the Leading Harvest Farmland Management
Standard — a third-party audited, outcomes-based certification built around 13 sustainability
principles covering soil health, water, biodiversity, and farm economics. That certification sets
a meaningful floor. But beyond it, we have developed our own proprietary regenerative
agriculture scorecard that goes further. The scorecard evaluates every property across six
pillars — Soil Health, Water Management, Social & Economic Well-Being, Reducing Chemical
Inputs, Carbon Sequestration, and Biodiversity — each broken down into granular criteria and
weighted by their relative impact on regenerative outcomes. Soil health, water management,
and social and economic well-being carry the most weight, because they have the greatest
direct influence on farm productivity and long-term resilience. The goal is accountability, not
optics.

For underwriting purposes, separating farms that are genuinely building long-term soil
capital from those applying a light green overlay to conventional operations is not a
philosophical exercise — it is a valuation one. That distinction matters enormously for
underwriting. A farm with degrading soil is an asset with a hidden liability. A farm actively
building soil health — even mid-transition — is an asset with an improving risk profile that
conventional farmland valuation models do not fully capture.

The Policy Signal Investors Should Be Reading

Beyond the agronomics, the policy environment is sending a clear directional signal. In
February 2026, USDA committed $700 million — $400 million through the Environmental
Quality Incentives Program and $300 million through the Conservation Stewardship Program
— specifically to fund regenerative agriculture practices in FY26.

Government capital at this scale does two things. It directly funds transition costs, reducing
the financial burden on farmers and operators. And it signals where regulatory and subsidy
frameworks are heading over the next decade. For private investors, that is a meaningful
de-risking of the thesis — not because policy guarantees returns, but because it shapes the
incentive landscape that operators and landowners will be navigating.

The Groundswell Moment — and What Comes After It

So why does a documentary matter to investors?

Not because a film changes fundamentals. But because cultural moments accelerate capital
flows. When Kiss the Ground came out in 2020, it introduced soil health to a mainstream
audience for the first time. Common Ground followed in 2023. Groundswell is the third act:
real farmers, five continents, measurable outcomes, already proving it at scale.

Consumer awareness creates procurement pressure. Procurement pressure creates corporate
sustainability commitments. Those commitments create supply chain premiums for verified
regenerative producers. Those premiums improve the financial case for transition. Capital
follows. We have seen this pattern before in organic, in grass-fed beef, in fair-trade coffee. The
market premium phase is where early institutional capital earns its return, before the
opportunity normalizes into consensus.

The investors treating regenerative agriculture as an ESG checkbox are arriving at the right
conclusion for the wrong reasons. The investors dismissing it as sustainability theater are
carrying yield risk, input cost risk, and long-term asset value risk that their models are not
capturing.

The soil is not a values story. It is a balance sheet.

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