Margins to Mainstream: Scaling Regenerative Agriculture

Session Overview

The first session in a three-part solutions series taking regenerative agriculture from Davos to New York, THE NAT convened 45 investors, corporates, scientists and farmers at 1 Hotel Mayfair during London Climate Action Week. The group concluded that regenerative agriculture is not a farming problem but a coordination problem: the science and practices are proven, yet farmers wait for markets, markets wait for policy, policy waits for evidence, and finance waits for risk clarity. Discussion centred on the transition-financing gap — the multi-year window of yield dips that short-horizon capital won’t cover — and on value chains, not individual farms, as the real unit of change, with corporate offtake agreements and blended finance identified as the clearest levers available today.

Speakers included:

• Rebecca Marmot — former Chief Sustainability & Corporate Affairs Officer, Unilever
• Prof. Thomas Crowther — Founder, Restor.eco & BRANCH Institute; Professor, Kaust University
• Mark Stevenson — Director of Strategy, Oath; Co-founder, CUR8
• Hari Balasubramanian — Managing Partner, EcoAdvisors
• Suzanne Westlake — Global Sustainability Director, pladis
• Sathya Raghu — Founder & CEO, Soul Forest
• Sandrine Dixson-Declève — Co-founder, Systems Transformation Hub; former President, Club of Rome
• Matthew McLuckie — Managing Partner, Posaidon Capital