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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