State of Sustainability Podcast

Solo Episode: Organic, Regen, and Rewilding — Drawing the Lines

SAIF: Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hamid, founder and CEO of Altruistiq.

Today we're talking about rewilding. I find the sustainability community divides into two groups on this topic: a small group that knows what rewilding actually is and tends to be deeply passionate about it, and a much larger group that pretends to know what it is and is usually equally passionate. This episode is an attempt to draw the lines clearly — between organic, regen, and rewilding — and then to talk honestly about whether rewilding can work at scale.

I should say upfront: I am pro-rewilding in principle. But I want to examine it through a business lens rather than an ideological one.

Organic vs Regen vs Rewilding: Drawing the Lines

Organic is still fundamentally a farming system. It is defined primarily by two things: inputs and certification.

On inputs, organic is about what you do and don't use in production. Which pesticides, which fertilisers, which treatments are permitted. To achieve organic status, you typically have to leave land fallow for around three years to clear out the inputs that would disqualify you. That leads directly to the second defining feature: organic is tightly certified and regulated. There is an established standard, a well-developed ecosystem of advisers and certifiers, and a shared understanding between retailers and consumers about what the label means.

Regen agriculture is similar in spirit but different in approach. Where organic controls inputs, regen focuses on outcomes. Has your farming approach increased species density? Is the soil richer? Are bee populations returning? Is there a thriving ecosystem developing around and within the farm that helps it regenerate rather than degrade over time?

Standard monoculture farming is, in some sense, the opposite of this. Large-scale soy in the US or canola in Canada is designed to be as close to an industrial process as possible. Heavy fertiliser and pesticide use is about yield control. And a feature of that approach — not a bug — is that it tends to suppress the wider ecosystem, because uncontrolled biodiversity competes with the industrial process you are trying to optimise.

Measuring regen success is inherently harder than measuring organic compliance. With organic, you check what was or wasn't used. With regen, you have to assess whether outcomes were actually achieved: did bee populations recover, did soil biodiversity improve, did the farm regenerate? This is why certification is still nascent in regen, and why the standards remain contested.

Rewilding is something else entirely. I would call it the anti-farming. The core idea is that you surrender land back to nature — not to improve its agricultural productivity, but because nature is the point. Any farming benefit is incidental.

There are different scales at which rewilding can operate. At the large end, you take a whole area or region and return it to natural processes. At the farm level, you rewild portions of the farm — hedgerows, field margins, patches of ground — while continuing to farm the rest.

A useful framework for understanding rewilding is what I've come across as the three Cs: core, corridor, and carnivore.

Core areas are where the rewilding itself happens — restored peatland, returning forest, whatever ecosystem is being brought back. These are the places where the ecological magic occurs.

Corridors are the connective tissue between core areas, allowing species to move safely from one natural space to another without having to cross roads or navigate through hostile agricultural land. I remember a discussion in the UK some years ago about planning permission for a squirrel tunnel — the principle is exactly right. If you want a functioning rewilded ecosystem, you need to be able to connect the cores.

Carnivores reflect the need for ecological equilibrium. A rewilded ecosystem needs apex predators and carnivores at different levels of the food web to keep the whole system in balance. You cannot have an ecosystem that functions naturally if you remove the predators that regulate it.

I'd add a fourth concept that I find equally compelling: anchor species. These are species whose presence unlocks activity from many others. Beavers are the classic example — their dams create habitat for a cascade of other species. Think of the anchor tenant in a shopping centre: if you get IKEA, the rest of the shops follow. Keystone or anchor species work the same way.

How Farming Systems Vary and Why This Matters

Before we talk about whether any of this scales, it helps to understand the terrain. I see mainstream farming in three broad categories: large-scale open-field monoculture, large-scale controlled agriculture (greenhouses, vertical farms), and smallholder farming.

Most of the economic value in global food production flows to the first two, which means most of it flows to the global north. The US, Canada, and Australia have access to large contiguous acreages that can be mechanised at scale, access to world-class input innovation, and highly productive agricultural land that has been developed over generations. As a result, they produce staple crops like chickpeas and lentils so cheaply that it is more cost-effective for countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to import them from Canada or Australia than to grow them domestically — even after paying for the shipping. That fact alone tells you something profound about the structural advantage built into large-scale monoculture farming in the global north.

A brief digression worth including: Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and is credited with saving approximately a billion lives through his work on dwarf wheat varieties in the 1950s and 60s, is a useful reference point for this tension. The monoculture farming model he helped spread averted famine across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The productivity of industrial agriculture is not simply a moral failure — it has sustained human civilisation at scales that nothing else has matched.

The question is what happens when you try to shift these systems toward organic, regen, or rewilding.

Large-scale open-field monoculture. Converting to organic requires convincing farmers to lose three years of productive income during the transition period. That only happens with very strong buyer incentives or exceptional foresight from the farmer. It is not impossible, but it is slow and expensive. Regen is actually somewhat easier, because it is less prescriptive: many of its practices — cover cropping, crop rotation, composting, soil conditioning — are already known and understood by farmers. From my own flower farm, I can say that seeing bee populations return by year two was one of the most tangible validations that what we were doing was working. Farmers understand outcomes. What they resist is being patronised by checklists from people who have never had to manage a harvest.

Controlled agriculture. Organic is becoming more common in some controlled environment settings. Regen is harder to apply because the whole point of controlled agriculture is to eliminate the natural variation that regen tries to work with.

Smallholder farming. This is where the most romantic assumptions about traditional farming tend to collide with reality. The smallholder farmers I have encountered are not natural stewards of the soil — they are typically pushed by middlemen who also function as lenders to over-fertilise and over-use pesticides, because the person advising them also profits from selling them inputs at a heavy markup. Organic certification is almost certainly impractical: asking a smallholder farmer to absorb three years without income is not a policy; it is a fantasy. Regen is theoretically more teachable, but here there is another structural problem: most smallholder farmers operate on verbal, annual or biannual lease agreements with no written contract. They have no land security beyond a handshake. It is unrealistic to expect someone with no certainty of farming the same plot in five years to invest in its decade-long soil health.

Can Rewilding Scale?

Now to the question that matters. I think rewilding can succeed at meaningful scale under two conditions.

Subsidy. If a state or regulatory body is willing to pay farmers to set aside land and act as custodians for nature, rewilding can happen. The UK government's Environmental Land Management scheme is an example of this. It has been controversial — I recently spoke with our own General Counsel at Altruistiq who argued that the rewilding policies contributed to both the spread and the severity of recent UK wildfires. There are legitimate debates about how to design these schemes well. But the principle is sound, and the UK is actually a reasonable test case.

The reason it works better in the UK than it would in the US or Canada is that the UK is not a meaningful agricultural producer. Its economy is built on financial services, law, insurance, and professional services. It has a politically engaged urban middle class that cares about access to nature. Setting aside some agricultural land in that context is economically modest and politically legible. In a country where agriculture is a major component of GDP, the subsidies required would be enormous and the economic cost of reduced output would be correspondingly large.

Premiumisation. The second path is where rewilding generates a land value premium that compensates for reduced agricultural output. This can work in certain categories. Wildfarmed is a brand I genuinely admire — clever mission, good product, well-executed B2B and B2C distribution. I think they will succeed. I do not think they will reach 1% of the global bread market. Bread is not the right category for premiumisation at that scale.

Cocoa might actually be more interesting here. We covered cocoa in a recent episode and identified a structural bind: the traditional growing regions in West and Central Africa are under severe threat from climate change, disease, and land loss, while bringing new areas under production triggers deforestation regulation. A world in which cocoa is increasingly grown in harmony with natural ecosystems — rewilded or semi-rewilded growing environments — and commands a corresponding premium might actually be achievable, particularly as the mass market shifts to cocoa alternatives and genuine cocoa becomes a high-value product. I could see double-digit percentages of the cocoa market being produced this way. That would be genuinely significant.

Where I Land

On rewilding: genuinely valuable, best suited to wealthy countries with small agricultural footprints and engaged publics willing to subsidise it, or to premium product niches where the economics can be made to work without subsidy. Not a scalable solution for countries where agriculture is economically central.

On regen: meaningfully more bullish. Large-scale monoculture farming is only about 70 to 80 years old, and many of the farms that adopted it are already seeing soil degradation. The case for regen is increasingly made by the data coming out of those farms, not by external advocates. I think regen will continue to gain ground among large-scale open-field producers as the productivity cost of ignoring soil health becomes undeniable.

On organic vs regen: they are more similar than different. Both are trying to achieve the same outcomes through different mechanisms. I expect them to converge rather than continue to compete separately.

I would love to hear your views on any of this — if there are aspects I haven't covered or positions you think I've got wrong, please write in. My email is in the show notes. And if you'd like to join us in person at the State of Sustainability Summit on October 14th in London, please reach out — we'd be very happy to have you.

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