How to Change Farming

Refreshingly, a new theory illustrates why it hasn't been - and won't be - corporate giants driving change in food and agriculture.

Mike Lee, author of Substack’s The Future Market today laid out a working theory of how to understand and make changes in the world. The 4 core factors for big changes to happen are:

1. Quality

2. Influence

3. Elimination

4. Control

The theory provides ample context, real-world examples and useful linkages to the situation facing employees of big ag and food organizations tasked with managing sustainability programs. Understanding just how strongly ‘organizational inertia’ defends the status quo, and all the reasons why, it becomes illogical to expect incumbent global brands to drive regenerative agriculture practice adoption.

The greenwashing, backtracking and pivots are confusing the very farmers they claim to want to help change. Conventional grain farmers expect major food brands, together with the Cargill’s and the Viterra’s and the Richardson’s of the world, to inform them about changes in market conditions.

Influence & Control

This expectation gives enormous control to the companies on the front lines with farmers, and influence. But notably, “influencers don't actually have to have the best solution; they simply need to connect with people and convince them that they do.”

Consider how conventional agriculture’s social media influencers and lobbyists talk about sustainability as though reducing tillage is enough. Implicitly, this stymies change by encouraging all the farmers who’ve already reduced tillage to carry on applying sales-agronomist-recommended rates of synthetic crop inputs.

It’s not like grain farmers can’t access information like Prairie Routes Research to learn about demand segmentation in markets beyond the local elevators. In fact, many are transitioning to real regenerative agriculture already, cleverly substituting biology for chemistry across their farmland, moving well beyond no-till to restore soil health and biodiversity.

These farmers sense the future recognition that will come from the markets once the supply chain figures out how to segregate commodities based on field-level emissions. In the meantime, corporate incumbents still believe they control industry messaging and can “use it to preserve the status quo and prevent changes being forced on their businesses,” as Lee points out is another use of the theory.

Are you a farmer interested in finding markets for low-input/sustainable/regenerative products? To learn more about about up-and-coming opportunities, email hello@prairieroutes.ca to schedule a free 30-minute consult.

Quality & Elimination

The other 2 factors for change are less insidious and more legitimate. Regenerative agriculture offers a bounty of new quality attributes, for example in pork chops like these from Deer Meadow Farmacy’s heritage breed pigs raised outdoors on pasture and in the bush, where they thrive – and provide ecosystem services by rooting in the soil.

Hey readers in the Winnipeg region: you can order these along with all other cuts of pasture-raised beef, bison, pork and chicken from Prairie Routes’ sister company: Stony Hill Farm. Home delivery available on weekends.

Note the color variation – an indication of both dark and white meat in each chop. And the thick layer of fat, where important nutrients are carried at measurably higher levels than lean and efficiently-produced grocery store pork.

All of this creates a meal ingredient so distinguished in taste from its industrial competitors that it can be marketed as a completely different product. That’s important to prevent unfair price comparisons to grocery store meat, which among other structural economic differences, doesn’t bear the full cost of labor.