What the price of food will not carry

Purpose matters. I want that said before anything else.

A strategy will not carry what the price of food will not pay for. Someone still gets the bill. In this trade, it is usually the grower.

I have spent nearly 40 years in organic, including the years we got it onto the grocery shelf. That is why I will say this. I have also been inside the other version of the business, the one that runs on a story and somebody else’s money. I have watched both of them hit the same wall.

The same gap shows up in the produce trade every season. Organic proved a harder way of growing could find a price once enough buyers understood the value.

Controlled-environment agriculture and regenerative agriculture are still fighting that fight. Purpose helps, but it does not write the check when the market treats the real cost as optional.

If the story never has to become a load that ships, a payroll that clears, and a grower who gets paid, the growers closest to the work are the ones left holding the bill. That is the test. That is why the price of food still matters.

What purpose is

When I say purpose, I do not mean a mission statement. I do not mean a B-Corp, an employee-ownership plan, or a new kind of fund. Those are structures. Some of them are very useful. They are not the thing itself.

Purpose is what the company is still for when the premium narrows, the next round of money does not come, and the easier path is sitting there. It is what you will not sell.

Profit can still be the result. It is not the reason. A company that only has a goal will change its goal. A company that knows what it will not sell has something to stand on when the price moves.

In practical terms, purpose shows up in how you treat people, how you handle quality when no one is watching, how you speak about the product to buyers, and how you decide what is worth protecting even when it costs more in the moment. It is the longer view applied to daily choices.

What capital is

Most people in produce know or have heard of an operating loan and a buyer. That is not the capital I am talking about. An operating loan is there so you can farm the year. You pay it back out of the crop. Venture capital and growth equity are different businesses.

Someone gives you a large sum because they need it back bigger, and they need to be out on a schedule and on time. Five years. Seven. Maybe ten. Their ending is a sale, or another raise, or a closing of the fund.

Your ending, if you are the operator, is that you still have to be farming when they are gone. Those are not the same mission. A friend in this trade put it better than I can: “Investment capital is not fertilizer.”

It is another business, and the farm, or the facility, is the raw material. When the return is slow, the clock does not wait on a grower, a crew, or a field that needs another season. I have been around that money. The difference matters, because it explains what happened next.

Controlled-environment agriculture

I have been inside the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) space. Vertical farms. High-tech indoor greenhouses. The promise of growing food without soil, weather, or seasons. I have had the great fortune to see some of the most amazing ideas and opportunities up close.

What I watched was largely that other kind of capital. At the peak in 2021, PitchBook data cited by The Wall Street Journal put U.S. venture funding into indoor farming at about $2.1 billion in a single year.

Plenty raised nearly $1 billion. Bowery raised more than $700 million. AppHarvest and AeroFarms raised hundreds of millions more.¹

The money was looking for the next disruption and a fast return. Reported sales never approached the capital that went in. Pure indoor growing is still a modest business next to the money that went in.

Many of the best-funded operators could not make commodity leafy greens work once energy, capital, true yields, and labor were counted against a field-grown price. A number of those companies have since restructured, closed facilities, or left the business.¹

Annual funding has fallen from that peak to a small fraction of it. The ones still building got narrower. A crop the market will pay for. A hybrid greenhouse. A cost discipline the original story did not have.

This is not an argument against indoor growing. CEA and agricultural technology have a place at the table. We are asking a finite planet to feed more people, in harder weather, on land we have already worked hard.

The people who tried were not foolish. In a lot of cases the growing worked. What did not work was expecting a market that treats food as a cheap item to pay, at scale, for a more expensive way of producing it, and raising the money as if that buyer already existed.

The story can raise the money. It cannot make the fundamentals true. Raise big, scale fast, figure out the economics later. That is a strategy. It is not a purpose.

Regenerative agriculture

Regenerative agriculture gets held up as the wiser answer. It looks like one. It works with a farm that already exists, instead of a building. It speaks in soil, water, and livelihoods, language a buyer already trusts.

The acreage is no longer a pilot, and it should be read carefully. ADM reported more than 5 million acres in its regenerative program in 2024, and about 4.6 million across 11 countries in 2025, with more than 56,000 farmers engaged.

PepsiCo reported 4.7 million acres in 2025 under regenerative, restorative, or protective practices, toward 10 million by 2030. Cargill reports 2.5 million acres engaged in North America since 2020, toward 10 million by 2030. These numbers overlap.

An acre in one company’s program can also be in another’s, and they should not be added together.²

The money is real, and most of what is public is still a promise, not cash in a grower’s account. By late 2025 the COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes had gathered more than $9 billion in commitments from more than 40 companies and institutions, up from $2.2 billion in 2023. The pledge runs to 2030.

It is aimed at 210 million hectares, about 520 million acres, and 12 million farmers.

PepsiCo has described a $216 million, multi-year effort with U.S. farmer organizations, aimed at more than 3 million acres.³ That money is aimed at working land. That is different from the indoor raise. It is not yet proof that the grower has been paid for the change.

Regenerative agriculture has a place, and the reason is not a slogan. We have spent decades taking from soil we still need. Putting that capacity back is maintenance we cannot put off.

Anyone who has stood in a field with a grower knows the difference between ground that is being cared for and ground that is being used up. That work is very real. It should not have to apologize for what it needs to thrive.

The pattern under the money is not as different as the language. A grower who is asked to change a practice often carries the cost before the price changes. Cover-crop seed. The pass to get it planted. A yield dip against the number the operating loan was built on.

USDA’s Economic Research Service has found that the short-term return to cover crops is often negative unless someone helps pay for them, and that a large share of operations that start the practice are not still doing it a few years later.⁴

That is not the grower failing. That is a claim moving faster than the contract. Indoor production hit the same unpaid gap from the other side. A case that could not clear its real cost at the price the buyer expected. Different system. Same sequence. Story first. Farm second.

There is still no single, widely adopted federal definition of regenerative agriculture.⁵ Acres enrolled are not a system changed. The risk is the same one I have watched in organic for years. The language gets adopted. A few practices get adopted.

The thing the word was supposed to protect does not. So is regenerative a real alternative, or the same tension in a form the buyer already wants to hear? It is both.

When it is rooted in something you will not sell — soil as living capital, a long relationship with the grower, money that can wait — it can outlast a model that tried to replace the farm.

It builds on what is already there. That difference is worth protecting. The people doing the work, often with no press release, should not be lumped in with a program that is mostly a claim. When the claim runs ahead of a result and a price the farmer can live on, it becomes another label. The acres get counted. The harder work of making it pencil lags behind. Same failure. Different building.

The price

This is where the two stories meet. It is the part the trade does not say plainly enough. We do not value food in this country. We say we value food in this country. Too often, the price we’re prepared to pay says otherwise.

We value cheapness, convenience, and a story we can put on a package. We have trained buyers and families to treat the price of food as something that should always come down, and to treat anything above that price as a premium to be justified or walked away from.

Organic has lived in that gap for a long time. The premium is a fragile admission that how food is grown should be worth something. It is not yet proof that the country or the world totally agrees.

CEA hit that wall when a more controlled case of greens still had to compete with a field price someone had decided was normal. Regenerative agriculture hits it when the cost of repairing soil arrives years before anyone will pay for the repair.

Neither one failed because the problem was imaginary. The planet is being asked to produce past its means. The soil is still being hurt. Both have a place. What they have not had, at the scale the stories promised, is a buyer who will carry the cost.

If we valued food — the soil, the labor, the true cost of producing it without stripping the place it comes from — both would have a better chance. Not because every model deserves the money. Because a real problem, honestly priced, can become a business.

A real problem with only a story becomes a raise, and then a reckoning. Purpose cannot stand in for a price the country will not pay. A strategy cannot either.

In organic, this is the daily argument. Are we in it because the way food is grown, and the people who grow it, are worth protecting? Or because the label still opens a door? Those are different companies. They can look the same on a shelf until the premium changes.

Purpose is what the company is still for when that door closes and the easier path is sitting there. It is what you will not sell. It will not pay the bill the country refuses. Most of the time that is the grower.

The rest of the trade gets to walk away. The country still gets the food. It gets it from the producers who could still make the price work.

Notes 1. PitchBook data cited by The Wall Street Journal ($2.1 billion, 76 U.S. indoor-farming deals, 2021). Company figures for Plenty, Bowery, and AeroFarms are approximate. Closures and restructurings are public record, summarized as a pattern.

2. ADM Regenerative Agriculture Report (2024: more than 5 million acres; 2025: about 4.6 million acres, more than 56,000 farmers). PepsiCo 2025 agriculture metrics. Cargill fiscal 2025 impact reporting. Figures overlap and are not additive.

3. WBCSD, COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes, November 15, 2025 ($9 billion+ committed through 2030, not cash paid to farmers). PepsiCo $216 million is a described multi-year investment.

4. USDA ERS; Persistence of Cover Crop Use in Crop Production in the United States, 2012–2022 (EIB-293, 2026).

5. No widely adopted federal definition. Newton et al., Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (2020); Congressional Research Service.