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Fashion’s embrace of regenerative agriculture is widely regarded as a win for the planet, but there’s still no industry standard for what it means in practice, or formal methodology to guide how it should be evaluated.
Textile Exchange hopes to change that with a new framework, launched last week, that lays out a set of indicators — rather than a one-size-fits-all standard — to assess regenerative agriculture projects or programmes.
The Regenerative Agriculture Outcome Framework aims to both help the fashion and textile industries quantify the impacts of regenerative agriculture, and also allow for variation in what regenerative farming actually looks like from one region — or even one farm — to another. True regenerative agriculture is a “place-based, outcome-focused systems approach, not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ checklist of practices”, Textile Exchange wrote in its Regenerative Agriculture Landscape Analysis, which was published in 2022 and was the precursor to the new framework.
The organisation wants to help ensure that as fashion continues to turn to regenerative agriculture as a climate solution, it preserves the integrity of the concept. By establishing a set of indicators that brands and farmers can choose from based on what’s appropriate for a given region, fibre and farm type, Textile Exchange hopes to respect “the context-based nature of regenerative agriculture”, while also setting expectations for meaningful progress and for how that progress should be documented.
“The Regenerative Agriculture Outcome Framework addresses several important gaps across the industry, most notably the need for a centralised reference point on what it means for a regenerative programme to truly be inclusive of outcomes and not just practices,” says Beth Jensen, director of impact for the Climate+ strategy at Textile Exchange. It also addresses the need to standardise how outcomes are measured, the need for brands to be able to vet different projects associated with regenerative agriculture and “the need for a researched set of outcomes to use in the Textile Exchange unified standard, which seeks to more directly link practices to outcomes”, she says.
Experts and advocates of regenerative agriculture applaud the effort, saying it could help to stem concerns about brands diluting the potential benefits of regenerative agriculture. It can potentially help to establish a level of accountability in fashion’s use of regenerative agriculture — while also creating the flexibility for farmers and communities to make decisions about their land based on local conditions and location-specific needs, rather than forcing a single set of requirements on everyone.
Some are concerned that it may not go far enough, however, to drive the type of transformation that farmers really need to be able to fully regenerate their land and soil.
In particular, the fact that it does not sever ties to the commodity market raises red flags for Rebecca Burgess, founder and director of the non-profit Fibershed. “It’s wonderful that Textile Exchange [has] deepened the textile industry’s understanding of what benchmarks are important and provided options for what gets measured and how,” says Burgess. “That said, I remain curious as to how we can build place-specific responses to climate change in our farming systems — as the framework encourages us to — while relying on commodity price structures.”
The typical way that fashion engages with regenerative agriculture is through a project or partnership that enables a brand to pay a premium for farmers who implement more sustainable practices. These premiums, however, are not often determined by the costs the farmer incurs as a result of those practices; rather, they are paid as a bonus, essentially, over whatever the current commodity price is for that crop.
“When commodity prices are low, these premiums are tolerable. What happens when the commodity market for cotton blooms to triple or quadruple what we’ve seen due to global heat waves, drought and flooding wiping out vast amounts of acreage? Will brands stick by the growers and continue to incentivise the biodiversity measures, the [soil organic carbon] building measures when the baseline price balloons?” says Burgess. “For our economic model to catch up with the ground level stressors already unleashed through climate change, we need to move into region-specific pricing that matches region-specific adaptation measures.”
However, restructuring how the agricultural market works is not the remit of the framework, Textile Exchange’s Jensen explains. It contains indicators relating to more equitable cost- and risk-sharing between brands and farmers, she says — but “the framework is not a standard and does not prescribe how business is conducted”.
It also highlights that a core message of the 2022 landscape analysis was to recognise the direct link between socioeconomic outcomes and holistic regenerative agriculture, which Textile Exchange says are given equal weight in the framework — with indicators including fair financing, livelihoods and farm community wellbeing — alongside ecological impacts. The organisation says the framework “answers the call for the industry to take an approach that includes the development of equitable partnerships with farming communities”, and that a key principle is that producers are not expected to bear the full responsibility for monitoring the outcomes on their own. That’s an important distinction, considering the disproportionate amount of risk and burden typically placed on farmers.
The framework’s indicators are organised into farm-level and brand-level categories for that reason, Textile Exchange says — to emphasise the need for brands and farmers to share the work that goes into transitioning a farm to regenerative agriculture and monitoring the progress made along the way.
The overarching goal is to accelerate the industry’s adoption of regenerative agriculture, and to ensure it does so in a way that benefits everyone. As Textile Exchange explains in the framework: “We believe that creating further alignment on which indicators to track, and laying some initial groundwork on how this might be done, is a critical step to speed progress on regenerative agriculture in a way that supports farm communities.”
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