How regenerative agriculture can help your hospitality business
Regenerative agriculture creates more resilient supply chains and security for hospitality operators.
🌱 It improves soil health and increases biodiversity while storing carbon
🌽 It creates tastier, more nutritious and reliable crops
Find out how using ingredients from regenerative farms will protect your business by building resilience, reducing your emissions and building brand value with your stakeholders.
1.
Build resilience
Regenerative farming increases crop resilience, reducing your exposure to the risk of supply chain interruptions and the price volatility of critical ingredients, such as flour.
2.
Reduce your emissions
Unlike conventional farming, regenerative agriculture reduces your chemical inputs and fossil fuel use, and locks carbon into soil, helping you reduce your scope 3 emissions while enhancing natural ecosystems.
3.
Enhance your brand
Provide tastier and more nutritious food, while showing all your stakeholders how you’re improving our natural world.
Helping members get the most from regenerative agriculture
As a member of the Zero Carbon Forum, you can:
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- Use your personalised Climate Action Plan to understand how much your business will benefit from switching to regenerative farms in your supply chain.
- Join our ‘Regen Ag’ Action Group to discuss, problem-solve and collaborate with peers in a pre-competitive space.
- Get one-to-one technical guidance to turn your plan into action by connecting with our gold-standard partners.
- Access our Marketplace and discover innovative regenerative and net zero suppliers who will speed up your climate ambitionsÂ
These brands are already sourcing key ingredients from regenerative farms.
Wildfarmed: setting the gold standard for regenerative flour
Wildfarmed is a collective of regenerative wheat farmers in the UK and France.
When a grower joins Wildfarmed they are signing up to the gold standard of regenerative farming, the first ever third-party audited regenerative standards for arable farmers in the UK. This means they are committing to restore ecosystems and completely remove their reliance on expensive and soil-depleting pesticides.
We have been working with Wildfarmed through our Marketplace directory which connects and showcases innovative sustainable suppliers to members of our Zero Carbon Forum.
Andy Cato - founder, Wildfarmed
What is regenerative agriculture?
"Regenerative agriculture" is not precisely defined, but our friends at Wildfarmed have written and defined their own Wildfarmed Regenerative Standards to hold themselves accountable for the gold standard of regenerative farming.
They define regenerative agriculture as an approach to farming that works with nature, enhances the land and puts soil health first. Regenerative farms have healthy soil (meaning less flooding and river pollution), produce nutrient-rich food and create thriving ecosystems filled with birds, bugs and bees, just as nature intended.
And how is it different to conventional agriculture?
| Conventional Agriculture | Regenerative Agriculture |
| Depletes soil and reduces carbon stored | Builds healthy soil that stores carbon |
| Dependence on pesticides | Zero pesticide use |
| Pollutes local waterways | Minimises water pollution |
| Less ground cover | More ground cover |
| Shallow roots and more soil erosion | Deeper roots and less soil erosion |
| Less biodiversity | More biodiversity |
| Nutritionally depleted crops | Tastier, more nutritious crops |
| Opaque supply chains | Traceable supply chains |
| Treats farmers poorly | Respects farmers and protects livelihoods |
Why does regenerative agriculture matter?
If every operator across the UK hospitality and brewing sector switched to fully regenerative flour, they would save over 3 million tonnes of carbon by 2030.
But it’s not just about carbon. At the moment, our global food system causes more problems than it solves. As well as creating a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, conventional agriculture is the number one cause of biodiversity loss, failing to deliver food security, decent livelihoods or healthy diets.
We believe that regenerative agriculture doesn’t just reduce the impact of the food supply chain – and therefore of the hospitality and brewing industry - it can also help give us a stable climate, a thriving natural world, a better future for farmers and tastier, more nutritious food.
Images provided courtesy of Wildfarmed.