How to Build a Market for Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative farming needs a better supply chain. Local Line connects farms to buyers, boosts margins, and makes regenerative transitions possible.

Regenerative agriculture is one of the most promising solutions to the environmental crisis, soil degradation, and decreasing nutrient density. It rebuilds topsoil, sequesters carbon, and boosts biodiversity. It’s great, but here’s the problem: It's not enough. Regeneratively grown products won't reach their full potential unless the food supply chain evolves alongside them.

In other words, it’s not just about how we grow food, it's about how we move food. How farmers access markets and how buyers discover the right farms. It’s in this supply chain transformation that Local Line plays a transformational role. 

The Painful Truth About Going Regenerative

When we talk to our farmers who are considering transitioning to regenerative practices, we consistently hear concerns like:

• "How do I make up for the costs to transition?"

• "Will buyers actually pay more for this,  consistently?"

• “Does this change how and who I sell to? Do I have to find new customers?”

Regenerative methods often increase the cost of production in the short-term. More manual labour, cover crops, rotational grazing, and natural soil inputs all add up. If the market doesn’t reward those efforts, proliferation of these regenerative practices will stall.

Most farmers already operate on razor-thin margins. As prudent entrepreneurs themselves, they can’t afford to make the switch unless they know there’s a secure, fair, and accessible market on the other side. That’s where Local Line comes in.

How Local Line Gives Life to Regenerative Ag

1. Discoverability: Making Regenerative Products Visible

One of the newer challenges in today’s food system is that buyers who want to support regenerative farms struggle to find them. That’s different when they become part of the Local Line network, where regenerative farms are easily findable in our ‘Discovery’ application. Our platform allows buyers—from chefs to grocers to institutions—to filter for farms and products grown using regenerative practices. Whether it’s grass-fed beef, no-till vegetables, or organically managed grains, buyers can easily find what they’re looking for. In addition, Local Line’s Sourcing Team actively assists buyers in finding and facilitating new relationships with farmers.

Our Discovery features and services have become a powerful flywheel. The more buyers search for regenerative products, the more farms are incentivized to list and market those products. The more farms list them, the more selection buyers have. Demand begets supply, and supply begets demand. Local Line moves the market beyond the “chicken-and-egg” dilemma. 

2. Shorter Supply Chains = Better Farmer Margins

In the first few years of the transition to regenerative, the cost of production usually goes up. That incremental cost is paid either from the (already slim) farmer’s margin, or from higher consumer prices at the retail level, neither of which are good. 

Local Line’s open platform shortens supply chains and removes intermediaries. This allows the farmers to capture a greater percentage of each retail dollar, and thus helps keep pricing affordable for consumers. By the time the product reaches a restaurant or a grocer, instead of being passed through a number of intermediaries that each take their cut, the farmer can use Local Line to go directly to the buyer and recapture lost margin. 

For Tim Nuss, who helps run Nuss Farms, his family's 1,500 acre diversified produce farm in California’s Central Valley, Local Line’s ability to connect them directly with an end buyer is what makes transitioning to regenerative possible.

According to Tim, “The role Local Line plays in bypassing traditional intermediaries that don’t value regen is critical. We can grow tomatoes using regenerative practices, but presently our buyer doesn't value that because our tomatoes get blended in with everyone else's and are sold as a commodity.”

Through Local Line, the regenerative transition cost is recovered through market-based transactions. Farming is equally as much about profitability as it is sustainability, and Local Line can help farmers reclaim the margin they need to make regenerative viable. Data analysis has proven that farmers that use Local Line increase their annual sales by 23% on average.

3. Aggregated Demand Makes Transitions Possible

Arguably, farmers want to grow regeneratively even more than their customers do, but demand is scattered and farms cannot be lightly expected to “bet the farm”. Farms won’t make the transition to regenerative practices just because one buyer asks them to, as often happens. But what if 10 buyers asked? Or 50? That would make the transition a much safer bet.  Local Line effectively aggregates demand from across our entire network, which enables us to say to our farmers, “It’s not just one buyer asking for this, it’s an entire cohort of them. You’ll have real, sustained demand if you make the switch.”

Even in our early days, Local Line has experienced spontaneous collaboration between farmers and buyers. Take cauliflower, for example. We’re currently working with an [undisclosed] customer that operates a nationwide restaurant chain and wants to locally source seasonal, regenerative cauliflower. While sizable, their total buying volume isn't quite enough to justify a full-scale transition for each of the local farms to service a regionally distributed restaurants. Since Local Line works with hundreds of other buyers who may also want regenerative cauliflower, we can actively aggregate that demand. Suddenly, a transition that once felt risky for the individual farms becomes worth it. Farmers can see that there is real demand and don’t need to feel like they are making a blind leap of faith.

It's Not Just the Soil That Needs Changing

The regenerative movement has focused deeply on production, but hasn’t yet developed a strategy to innovate the associated supply chains. Local Line is reimagining supply chain processes and facilitating data access, which increases access and transparency for regeneratively grown products. 

What happens if we grow all the food and there’s no established supply chain to move it? One of the worst things that could happen is that we succeed in transitioning our farmland, only for those farmers to remain locked into a supply chain built for a different era. Slow payments. No traceability. Low margins. No control.

We don’t want our future food system to be one where we grow great products that get stuck living in a slow moving, wasteful, brittle supply chain. And today’s consumer wants more than just sustainability–they want transparency, they want to know their farmer, and they want food with a story. At the same time, today's farmers are younger, more tech-savvy, and more engaged than ever before. They’re not just growing food; they’re entrepreneurs building brands, and they expect to participate in a supply chain that matches their ambitions. Add to that the increasing regulatory requirements around traceability, and the future becomes clear: Farms don’t just need better production, they also need better distribution.

“Over time,  Local Line can help us replace lower value deals with higher profit ones where we work directly with the buyer. This kind of new supply chain is what I view as the accelerant for getting farmers to change their growing practices,” Tim says. 

Regenerative Agriculture Needs Local Line

Local Line is the commerce layer for regional food systems. We act as the connective tissue between regenerative supply and regenerative demand. We make it easier to find regenerative farms, we help farms earn more for producing it, and we aggregate the demand to make transitions possible.

The regenerative movement has already proven its value on the land. Now it needs to win in the market. In order for regen to succeed as a market force, it needs a commerce layer, which is the role we play at Local Line.