How ag giant ADM scaled its regenerative program to 5 million acres

Agriculture giant ADM has hit its target of deploying regenerative practices on 5 million acres a year ahead of schedule, the company announced this week. The news comes as businesses across food and agriculture, including PepsiCo, Cargill and General Mills, are reporting making headway with similarly ambitious commitments.

How ADM hit 5 million acres

If you read up on the benefits of regenerative agriculture you can come away wondering why all farmers don’t do it. By limiting till, using cover crops and deploying other regenerative methods, farmers can boost soil health, reduce erosion and improve water retention. The challenge is time and money: Some regenerative methods increase costs for producers and don’t provide returns, e.g., increased yields, for several years.

ADM helps bridge the gap by providing annual payments of up to $40 per acre per crop to farmers who implement regenerative practices. The company prefers to link payments to the outcomes of such methods, such as changes in soil carbon levels. But that requires farmers to bear more risk than some are prepared to take, so ADM also offers “practice-based” payments that can be earned simply by introducing regenerative techniques.

The incentives worked. ADM’s original goal, announced in 2022, was to hit 4 million acres by 2025. The company upgraded that goal by a million acres the following year, and then achieved its new target in 2024, it announced this week in its annual regenerative agriculture report. The large majority of the regenerative acres — 4.7 million — were in North America, where the company purchases wheat, corn and other crops. A survey of 700 farmers in the region found that 90 percent said the program had a positive financial impact on their operations and 98 percent planned to re-enroll.

The business case for regenerative agriculture

ADM did not share the total amount paid to farmers last year, but did disclose that payments ranged between $3 and $40 per acre per crop. Back-of-the-envelope math suggests an outlay that could have surpassed $100 million.

Two new revenue streams make this possible. Food companies have set their own regenerative targets, and need partners who work more closely with farmers to help implement them. ADM’s biggest partner is PepsiCo, which has helped fund the production of 675,000 acres of regenerative wheat, corn and soy for use in brands such as Lays, Doritos and Pepsi. ADM can also earn a premium on regenerative crops in some markets, such as crops for use in biofuel production in Europe.

A third, non-monetary, benefit is reduced emissions. Because it knows what each farmer in its program is doing, ADM can model the impact on its Scope 3 emissions. The company estimates that emissions from farms in the program were 1 million tons lower in 2024 than they would have been had regenerative practices not been deployed.

It’s worth noting that this reduction, while impressive, still leaves ADM with a mountain to climb if it’s to hit its target of reducing Scope 3 emissions by 25 percent by 2035. The company generated 114 million tons of Scope 3 emissions in 2024, down just 2 percent from its 2021 baseline and up 6 percent on the previous year.

What the rest of the sector is doing

Many companies made regenerative commitments around five years ago and the results so far are encouraging. Cutting emissions has in many areas proved more difficult than anticipated, but several companies are tracking well toward regenerative goals.

General Mills made one of the earliest commitments, setting a target in 2019 of 1 millions acres by 2030. It’s currently at 600,000, according to its 2025 sustainability report.
Cargill, an ADM rival, said in 2020 that it would deploy regenerative agriculture on 10 million acres by 2030. It has more work to do than some others: Deployment in 2024 was 1.1 million acres.
PepsiCo announced a 7 million acre target in 2021, which it subsequently increased to 10 million acres. The company reported hitting 3.5 million acres in 2024.
Unilever, Nestlé, Mars and Mondelēz have committed to spending in the region of $1 billion each on value-chain projects that include regenerative agriculture.

These results should, however, be taken somewhat skeptically. Unlike organic agriculture, which is regulated by governments, there is no single agreed definition of what constitutes regenerative agriculture. This complicates comparison of different programs. Precise measurements of the impact of this work is also lacking. Models that translate practices into likely outcomes are widely used, but on-the-ground measurements, which would provide more accurate data, are too expensive to carry out at scale.

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