Should regenerative agriculture be defined by practices or outcomes?
Regenerative agriculture is usually described by what practitioners do. In a film launched with Good Earth Cotton at New York Climate Week, Professor Jacqueline McGlade argues it should be judged by what the land shows, with soil organic carbon as the measure where practices comes together.
Regenerative practices matter, but which ones get used should be the grower’s decision, because what works in one location is not the rule book for another. Every landscape has its own soil, climate and conditions. Growers are the experts on their own land, and telling them what they must and must not do misses the point. The job of a standard is to test and measure the outcome.
Good Earth Cotton has built its approach on this principle, giving growers the freedom to farm for their own soil and conditions and judging them on measurable results rather than prescribed practices.
An outcome only counts if it can be shown. As Jacquie puts it, in business “it’s no good saying, ‘I’m good.’” The evidence has to come from the land itself, as primary data: measurements taken from the field, frequently and consistently, so that anyone can look at them and see what good looks like without ever setting foot on the farm. A regional average describes a type of land, not a farm.
Soil organic carbon is where it all comes together. Every practice a grower chooses is eventually reflected in it, and it is one of the key indicators of healthy soil under the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Land Sector and Removals Standard now asks for exactly this kind of evidence: location-specific primary data, traceable back to where a product came from.
customer perspective
It’s not just about saying we’re regenerative, it’s about showing it with real data and transferring that knowledge with integrity.
Danielle Statham
Co-Founder, Good Earth Cotton
Read the Good Earth Cotton case study to see what this looks like in practice. We measure soil organic carbon across their 68,058 hectares at 10-metre resolution, with a continuous record back to 2017, and FibreTrace tracks the fibre from gin to garment, creating a verifiable chain from the field to the finished product.