From sowing to growing: cultivating value in regenerative agriculture

Within a generation, soil degradation could undermine our capacity to feed a growing population, yet the tools to reverse it already exist on working farms today.

Roughly a third of the world’s soils are already degraded, and over 90% could be degraded by 2050 on current trends.¹ The resilience of our food system is also becoming increasingly important as weather patterns become more volatile.

So, what tools already exist to reverse this — and who must act?

Almost two harvests ago, we hosted our first Sustainability Sphere event on regenerative agriculture. We closed on a note of optimism: “Rooted in sustainability, growing for tomorrow”. That tomorrow is now arriving. The question is no longer whether regenerative agriculture works, but how we value it, how we share its risks and how we scale it.

In collaboration with Andy Cato and Wildfarmed, Rothschild & Co Wealth Management UK was proud to co-host a Sustainability Sphere dinner that brought together landowners, investors, farmers and experts to ask how regenerative agriculture, a biological answer to a chemical-driven food system, could deliver a future that is resilient, abundant and restores agency.

After selling the rights to his music with Groove Armada to become a regenerative farmer, Andy co-founded Wildfarmed in 2018 with friends George Lamb and Edd Lees. Its mission is to scale regenerative agriculture and transform the food system by supporting a community of growers across the UK to farm in a nature-friendly way, while measuring the impact of what happens in these fields.

Today, Wildfarmed oats, barley and wheat are being used by over 1,000 food businesses from artisanal bakeries to Michelin-starred kitchens. Its own range of bread is also available in supermarkets nationwide

The key takeaways from the event are presented in this report.

Eating into capital: Mispricing nature

Biodiversity isn’t just about species counts. It is the engine of resilient landscapes, productive soils and stable food systems. Healthy soils underpin biodiversity and create value yet remain largely invisible and unpriced within today’s food system.

Under conventional accounting, clean water, living soil and biodiversity are treated as free inputs — externalities that never appear on the balance sheet. True cost accounting attempts to correct this, making visible the hidden costs of food production, revealing the value that regenerative practices create by avoiding them.

Seen this way, the question is not whether nature has value, but who currently pays for its loss — and who is rewarded for restoring it.

If true cost accounting tells us what we’ve been failing to value, regenerative practices show us how that value is rebuilt, often through strikingly simple means such as cover cropping. These are non-cash plants grown to protect and enrich the soil rather than to be harvested. This improves soil water retention by increasing organic matter, preventing evaporation and creating natural root pathways.²

A global meta-analysis found that cover cropping can increase water infiltration by around 35%, helping farmland absorb and hold more rainfall, a key buffer against both drought and flooding.³ In a 2024 field trial with Wildfarmed, run by Regenified (an independent firm that verifies regenerative farming outcomes against measurable soil health standards), water infiltration improved by 36%. The following year, research institute NIAB recorded a 3.8x uplift in in-field plant diversity.⁴

What value does this create? For growers, richer soil and better water efficiency mean fewer inputs and more resilient plants that can put their energy into growth and fruit production. The benefits also go beyond just the farmers: an early study of soil degradation in England and Wales estimated its annual cost at £1.2 billion, with around a quarter of a billion pounds attributed to agriculture’s contribution to flood damage.⁵

Another angle focuses on water pollution. With minimal synthetic fertiliser input from farmers, runoff of chemical pollutants into the water system is vastly reduced, saving pollution costs of the water companies and reducing environmental damage.

Six major companies now pay Wildfarmed growers a premium because the regenerative approach reduces water pollution at source.⁶

Taken together, these benefits expose the flaw in pricing nature at zero. The growers’ lower inputs, the water company’s avoided treatment costs, the possible spared flood damage from the public purse. True cost accounting reframes regenerative agriculture as a correction: paying for outcomes the market has long taken for free. And this may only scratch the surface. A point was raised during the dinner that there may even be a health dividend — the prospect that food grown in nutrient-rich soil may be better for us, shifting costs off our health systems too.

Conclusion

Regenerative agriculture asks us to think like long-term investors: to look past the cost of a single season towards the compounding returns of healthier soil, cleaner water and more resilient farms. The evidence shared over dinner pointed in one direction — that working with nature, rather than against it, creates value our food system has long failed to price.

Capturing that value at scale will need farmers, corporates, financiers and policymakers each to move, and to trust that the others will follow.

The reward is a food system that is more resilient, more abundant and fairer to the people who grow our food — and, just perhaps, better for our health too. Two harvests on, the seeds we spoke of are beginning to grow.

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