Article 
In brief...
As brands deepen their commitments to regenerative agriculture and farmers navigate the realities of transition, a recent Innovation Forum webinar brought stakeholders across the supply chain into conversation. Below is a summary of the discussion on what scaling regenerative cotton actually requires
A Shift from “Why” to “How”
For years, regenerative agriculture has been tested through pilot programs. Now, the conversation is changing. The industry is moving beyond asking whether regenerative practices work, to tackling the harder question: how to operationalise them at scale.
This urgency is driven by mounting pressures on agriculture – climate volatility, soil health, and supply chain instability. Healthy soils, a key part of regenerative systems, improve water retention, resilience to extreme weather, and long-term productivity. Regenerative agriculture is not just a sustainability initiative; it is increasingly viewed as a business imperative.
"The conversation is now shifting from whether regenerative can work to how we operationalise it across our supply chains."
How leading brands are engaging
Major brands are playing a pivotal role in scaling regenerative cotton by creating demand signals across the supply chain.
For example, J. Crew has embedded regenerative cotton into its sourcing strategy, recognising that cotton accounts for roughly 70% of its fibre use.
Since launching its program in 2022, the company has:
- Partnered directly with farmers
- Supported over 40 farms across the U.S. and India
- Impacted more than 130,000 acres
- Integrated regenerative cotton into hundreds of products
One notable initiative: a partnership with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the largest Black-owned agricultural cooperative in the U.S., to fund a regenerative cotton demonstration plot in Alabama – giving farmers a lower-risk environment to experiment with new practices before adopting them at scale.
Brands including IKEA similarly see their role as shaping demand while ensuring regenerative practices remain adaptable to local farming conditions.
"Regeneration is outcome-based. It is not a fixed recipe. It's a spectrum of practices that needs to be adapted to local conditions – soil type, water availability, climate, farm size."
The internal dimension of scaling is equally important and often underappreciated.
For a brand operating at IKEA’s scale, the risk of oversimplifying that complexity is unavoidable.
Key challenges include:
- Building new relationships with farmers
- Integrating regenerative cotton into complex supply chains
- Aligning internal teams and priorities
- Communicating value clearly to consumers
Regenerative thinking must be embedded into to everyday procurement and design decisions, rather than treating it as a standalone sustainability project.
"It's important how we talk with our procurement teams, our design teams, and management, so that regeneration is not a special project, but a part of everyday decision-making."
The farmer perspective: complexity and risk
While brand ambition is growing, farmers face practical and economic realities that complicate adoption. Regenerative agriculture is not a fixed set of practices, but a context-specific system shaped by climate, soil, and crop mix. What works in one region may not work in another.
Larkin Martin, who has farmed in northern Alabama for over 35 years and transitioned her family operation to significantly regenerative practices over the past decade, highlighted several challenges at farm level:
- Lack of standardised definitions of “regenerative”
- Complex and inconsistent certification systems
- Data and reporting burdens across multiple programs
- Economic risk during transition, including potential yield loss
Martin also stressed that certification frameworks fail to account for the reality of diverse farm operations. A survey asking about average fertiliser use without accounting for crop rotation or applying universal water management standards regardless of local climate, produces data that simply isn’t meaningful. “Water management is a minimum issue for us because we don’t have irrigation,” she noted. “It’s the most important thing somebody can do in an irrigated desert to be regenerative.” One framework cannot accommodate both.
The regenerative transition is not a short-term process. While some programs operate on 2–3-year timelines, meaningful change requires long-term commitment – and that incentive-based programmes with a defined end point risk producing superficial change.
“The transition involves change and it's hard and you have to set your planners differently and all sorts of technical things. But the idea that it's a three-year thing and then you're finished and you're regenerative after that is really a falsehood. I worry about programs that are incentive-based and temporary, not having the long-term systems change impact that we want.”
Beyond economics, Martin described tangible signs of progress on her farm that are difficult to translate; wildlife returning to cover crops, earthworms visible in soil that would have been unrecognisable a decade ago, and a sense that the land itself is healthier. These qualitative signals, she argued, matter alongside the quantitative ones, and farmers often see them long before any data does.
The role of incentives and market signals
Financial incentives are essential, but not sufficient. Brands have experimented with premium payments to support farmers, either directly or through intermediaries. These premiums can help offset transition costs and reward sustainable practices.
Brands have experimented with premium payments to support farmers, either directly or through intermediaries, to help offset transition costs and reward sustainable practices. But as Katie O’Hare, vice president of sustainability at J. Crew, noted, getting premiums to farmers is only half the challenge. A key issue is ensuring that regenerative cotton actually flows through into finished products. Without that supply chain connection, farmers can produce regenerative cotton and receive a premium, but the wider system remains incomplete.
"We gave these incentives and we had a really hard time getting the cotton into our supply chain. They can grow all the regenerative cotton and that's great and get the premium – but if they can't sell it, we're not finishing the picture."
Key limitations of current incentive models identified in the discussion:
- Short-term incentives may not drive lasting change
- Farmers need stable, long-term market demand
- Without supply chain integration, regenerative cotton may not reach end products
There was a clear call for long-term pricing models over temporary pilot payments. Martin pointed to Quaker Oats’ approach with oat growers (a guaranteed price over multiple years tied to specific practices) as the kind of stability that changes farmer behaviour and enables genuine long-term planning.
Measurement: outcomes over checklists
A central theme of the discussion was how to measure regenerative agriculture effectively. How do you verify regenerative outcomes in a way that is credible, scalable, and doesn’t create unsustainable reporting burdens for farmers?
There is growing consensus that rigid, practice-based checklists are insufficient. Instead, the focus is shifting toward outcomes-based metrics, such as:
- Soil carbon
- Water efficiency
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Land productivity
Martin referred to Ralph Lauren’s investment in the Soil Health Institute, which has surveyed cotton soils across different growing regions to establish localised baselines. Understanding what is achievable in a given region is key for impactful measurement. Generic benchmarks drawn from published averages struggle to function at that level of nuance.
Brand alignment on measurement is an urgent priority. Currently, farmers can face multiple data requests from multiple buyers, all asking for slightly different information in slightly different formats. Streamlining that reporting burden, ideally through shared industry frameworks, is both a practical necessity and a matter of respect for farmers’ time.
Collaboration
No single actor can scale regenerative agriculture alone. Speakers emphasised the need for:
- Alignment on metrics and standards to reduce reporting burden
- Collaboration across brands to create consistent demand
- Partnerships with intermediaries to enable scale
- Inclusion of farmer voices in decision-making
Emerging frameworks, such as the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, aim to provide traceability, standardised data, and scalable models for collaboration. Launched in 2020, the Trust Protocol is a voluntary, field-level sustainability programme and traceability platform that tracks cotton from farm to finished product, providing brands with verified data across six key environmental metrics: land use, soil carbon, water management, soil health, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy efficiency.
The issue of demand
Today, the same growers that are implementing regenerative practices are facing a broader structural challenge: the widening gap between what it costs to grow cotton and what the market will pay for it.
Cotton prices are currently more than 30% below the average cost of production, meaning farmers are losing money on every bale they grow.
This price collapse does not exist in isolation. It is directly linked to declining demand for cotton. While synthetic fibres now account for roughly 70% of clothing fibre, for example, cotton sits at around 19%. As demand for cotton shrinks, so does its market price, further squeezing the farmers who grow it.
Hershfield emphasised that although synthetics are necessary in categories such as activewear and swimwear, their use elsewhere should be reduced, adding that stronger demand for cotton will be the key driver of price change.
Stronger demand creates the commercial pull needed to lift prices back above the cost of production, making farming economically viable again and enabling long-term investment in the land and practices that sustain it.
Government policy can help increase the demand; Currently, the industry-led Buy American Cotton Act would offer tax credits to brands using U.S. cotton as a means to stimulate demand.
Increasing demand for natural fibres is seen as essential to:
- Improve farmer economics
- Support long-term supply stability
- Enable investment in regenerative practices
Conclusion: A system in transition
The final remarks from each panellist converged on a few consistent themes: collaboration across the value chain, patience with the timeline for change, and the importance of keeping farmer voices central to decisions made far upstream.
Martin put it plainly: “Keep talking with farmers as you think about ways to match your needs and limitations with their needs and limitations.”
Blomander distilled it to “full value chain collaboration.”
O’Hare reminded attendees that the industry is “very much in the middle of the journey.”
And Hershfield closed with the reminder that “there are lots of different ways to develop programmes that work for your business, and it’s not just one size fits all.” When it comes to sourcing, however, Hershfield stresses the importance of leveraging U.S. cotton; increasing demand for the fibre will improve farmer livelihood and lead to stronger supply chains.
What the discussion made clear is that scaling regenerative cotton is not primarily a technical problem. The building blocks for scale are emerging – brand commitment, farmer engagement, measurement frameworks, and collaborative platforms. But significant barriers remain, particularly around economics, standardisation, and long-term incentives.
Ultimately, success will depend on shifting from fragmented pilots to coordinated, system-wide change.
This webinar was hosted by Innovation Forum in partnership with COTTON USATM. Liz Hershfield and Larkin Martin will be with us at Innovation Forum’s Sustainable Apparel and Textiles Forum in Amsterdam (29-30 April), and Liz and Katie O’Hare will be joining us in New York City (3-4 June).
Author details
Webinar
Apparel 
Podcast
