Marketing Regenerative Wheat Flour in the UK
A new marketing channel in the United Kingdom is paying a 25% premium for wheat from advanced regenerative fields. The bread and flour is sold in more than 400 stores, restaurants and bakeries.
Over the past 15 years, Wildfarmed in the UK has grown a farm, marketing, milling, and distribution business, centered around regenerative land management practice adoption.
Rather than creating a definition or following a protocol, Wildfarmed is based on standards of care. Over multiple years, the farmer sellers:
Intercrop with pulses, other companions or in an annual/perennial mix
Minimize bare soil, using cover crops ahead of spring crops
Use a maximum of 80kg of N/ha – with nutrition based on need derived from plant sap analysis and leaf testing
Avoid insecticides, fungicides and herbicides
Integrate livestock into the system at least once in a three-year rotation
As with a similar U.S. regenerative wheat marketing program, the Wildfarmed value chain relies on strategic partnerships. It is a collaboration between likeminded commercial stakeholders in farming, software, seed, milling, and education.
For example, Soilmentor provides the field-level testing and monitoring, to feed into the traceability chain. Partnerships in seed, milling, and brand promotion are described in more detail below.
The Role of Seed in Marketing Regenerative Wheat
Farmers purchase from Cope Seeds, who are “championing conventional varieties suited to agroecological, low-input systems.” Neither heritage nor modern varieties are preferred… rather, Wildfarmed seeks to balance disease tolerance, yield potential, and milling attributes to come up with the best blend for the program overall.
Cope Seeds also trades grain. Connecting buyers and farmers enables the business to anticipate the varieties that will be in demand in the future. They also share in the work of bringing together commercial stakeholders with the same interest to promote regenerative agriculture.
The Milling Partnership
The Wildfarmed program uses Matthews Costwold Flour for milling. Blending grain from different farms is necessary to achieve a consistent quality product. Because of this, each pack of flour may contain grain from multiple different fields… but since the management standards are the same for everyone, the label claim can still validate and start to quantify ecological outcomes.
This video shows how Cotswold’s culture and business philosophy align with the other stakeholders. Similar to Kiss the Ground in North America, extension group FarmED works alongside value chain stakeholders, to educate and promote the principles of regenerative agriculture to the public.
Competing on Price and Contract Terms
In an article published last week, Wildfarmed is described as a ‘collaborative supply chain business.’ The benefits offered to farmer sellers are paraphrased from the article as follows:
Simple contract terms and premium prices
Area-based contracts to purchase the entirety of production, including mixed-grain intercrops
Generous milling specifications
Agronomy advice from regenerative agriculture specialists
Free software account for recording soil and sap tests, crop observations and other metrics
Knowledge exchange, events and community support
Sellers choose to fix the contract price, or take a premium on top of the basis at harvest. The fixed price this year is £310/t, which converts to C$14.25/bu at today’s exchange rate for wheat. Last year, the program traded above conventional wheat prices in the UK by more than 25%.
Conclusion
Regenerative grain value chains are establishing market share in multiple geographies. The longer the distances between stakeholders, the more difficult are the market economics and finding a fit.
In the meantime, alternative means of compensating landowners for beneficial management practices include government payments, fees paid by corporations, and emerging carbon market offsets. Carbon payments are not widely available currently and all of the trading platforms are privately managed, making them risky to participate in until government regulations are established.