Farmers Will Grow What People Want.
- Wild Oats
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Three things stand between us and a better food system. We went to Wisconsin to find out which one is doing the most damage.
Each year, the Regenerative Organic Alliance brings together farmers, scientists, brands, and grocers for a day called Together We ROC® The Midwest. This year it was held at Gwenyn Hill Farm in Wisconsin.
We're not the kind of brand that reads the cliff notes for an event like that and calls it participation so we sent our Brand Manager, Will to check it out and bring back the latest on the regenerative organic movement.
Regenerative Organic From Soil to Shelf
The day kicked off with a panel of experts:
Sandy Syburg, farmer and activist. He runs White Oak Farm, the first Regenerative Organic Certified® farm in Wisconsin.
Dr. Erin Silva, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the first organic researcher the state ever recruited.
Small detail that turned out to be the whole point: the panel was seated in a very specific order. The farmer, the scientist, the brand, then retail. ROA CEO Christopher Gergen said he did it on purpose. Soil to shelf, left to right. The seating chart echoed the very real process of getting ROC products out in the world.
Cost. knowledge. market.
These are the three reasons a farmer doesn't go regenerative organic. We spent the day learning which one is the biggest. Turns out it's the one with your name on it.
Since 2020, ROC® has reached 70,000 farms across 47 countries and 22 million acres. The goal is 100,000 farms and up to 40 million acres by 2030.
So what's the bottleneck? Not the science. Not the farmers.
Christopher has spent his tenure asking growers why they haven't transitioned and while the same three barriers come back every time, one of them wins by a mile:
"If there is not a clear demand signal, then farmers will be like, sure, it's great to be thinking about regenerative practices, but I need to be able to justify the time, energy and cost that goes into it."
That's why the ROA flipped its entire strategy.
It used to be a push: convince farmers to change. Now it's a pull: build the demand so the market drags them in.
Which brings us to the best thing anyone said all day.
"Farmers will grow what people want."
That's Sandy Syburg, who runs the first Regenerative Certified Organic® farm in Wisconsin.
So here's the uncomfortable, hopeful math. The only way to change what gets grown is to change what gets bought. That's not us wagging a finger at you. That's a farmer telling you where the lever is.
Look at the American landscape: corn and soybeans to the horizon. That's not because farmers like to grow those crops. It’s because that’s what the market ordered.
Why Regenerative Organic Certification even exists
Quick refresher. The ROA was founded in 2018 by the Rodale Institute, Patagonia, and Dr. Bronner's. They looked at organic and said good foundation, not good enough. So they added three pillars on top: soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. Then they spent two years building the standard with actual farmers before launching the certification in 2020.
Why bother?
Regenerative Organic = More Nutritious Food
Sara Newmark of True Grace made the connection that big ag doesn’t want us to make: how we farm is directly connected to how nutritious our food actually is.
As she put it, "the broccoli your grandma ate is not the same broccoli as today."
That's not nostalgia. That's soil.
Newmark's own turning point came standing in a Rodale Institute field over a decade ago when a mentor told her that she was missing the biggest piece: the commitment to soil.
That's the thesis she and her co-founders built True Grace on in 2020. It's also why the company is still, years later, working to stand up a regenerative beet supply chain in the Midwest from nothing. Building the demand is one problem. Building the supply chain to meet it is a different, slower one, and somebody has to do both at once.
Soil Loss: The Crisis we should all be Shouting About
If Sandy made the economic case, Dr. Erin Silva made the case that should scare you a little.
She runs UW–Madison's Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial. That means she's studying conventional, GMO, organic, and grass-based systems side by side. Her data shows organic systems building soil health over 30-plus years using some tillage, without the herbicide.
She opened with the thing nobody wants to talk about: we've collectively agreed to panic about air quality, water quality, and climate, but not about soil, even though it's disappearing at an alarming rate, washing straight down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Sandy brought the ground-level version of that same argument. As a farmer, he's watched neighbors get sick — sometimes fatally — in ways he ties directly to farm chemistry.
He's also seen the tangible upside of doing things differently: better water infiltration, better nutrient cycling, less pest and disease pressure, even when that upside doesn't come with an obvious, immediate paycheck attached.
The last mile is the cashier
None of this closes the loop without the store. Rachel Comeaux runs sustainability for INFRA, the independent grocery cooperative, roughly 400 member companies, close to 650 stores.
Her version of the demand-signal problem is the most literal one on the panel: if the person at the register can't explain why the ROC product costs two dollars more, that price gap just reads as a dealbreaker.
So INFRA's whole model is arming staff first, shared signage, end-cap campaigns, a coordinated push, so no single store has to build that education from scratch.
She was just as candid about where that support runs out: INFRA can hand a retailer the tools, but it's still that retailer's call who gets the good shelf space. Which is exactly the tension a small, first-year regenerative producer runs into when they're standing next to a brand with a marketing budget.
Where Wild Oats fits In
We didn't have to claim our seat at this table. Christopher gave it to us, unprompted, while explaining how the pull strategy works:
"It's so great that we've got great brands like Wild Oats and True Grace and others who are leaning into this and saying, we want to create that demand."
That's the job. Wild Oats is first to market with Regenerative Organic Certified® juice and smoothies. Our ROC® eggs are rolling out now, and a number of our egg farms sit right there in Wisconsin.
When Wild Oats started it was just one store in Boulder, CO with big dreams. Now we are a national brand with the ability to put money behind our values and lead the charge towards a future that is more equitable, organic, and regenerative.
That's the reason a distributor of KeHE's size showing up and committing to this standard matters.
So what do you do with this?
Nothing complicated. Just become one more person contributing to the pull strategy.
Every time you buy a Regenerative Organic Certified® product, you are the demand signal. You are the market barrier, falling. You're telling a farmer somewhere that the hard path has a buyer at the end of it.
That's not a marketing line. That's the actual mechanism. It's the only one there is.
22 million acres down. Not enough. But moving.
Get MAD. Then get to the store.
Wild Oats is Regenerative Organic Certified®. Our juices and smoothies were the first ROC certified beverages on the market, and our ROC eggs are rolling out now. Find us near you.
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