#112 - GROUNDSWELL, ALEC'S, PETS

This Week in Regenerative Agriculture
Wednesday, May 27th

5 stories. Every Wednesday. Right to your inbox.
We are now accepting sponsored posts!
Submit Your Own Story Here! (maybe it’ll be on next week’s edition!)

Groundswell, a documentary about regenerative agriculture executive produced by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, has won the Golden Globes Prize for Documentary at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The film is the third in a trilogy by directors Joshua and Rebecca Harrell Tickell — following Kiss the Ground (2020) and Common Ground (2023) — and was shot across five continents, following farmers, scientists, and Indigenous leaders working to restore soil health. In her acceptance speech, Rebecca Harrell Tickell underscored the movement’s real-world momentum, pointing to a dramatic surge in adoption: regenerative farmland in the US has grown from 3.5 million acres when the earlier films were released to over 86 million acres today.

Link

Alec’s Ice Cream — billed as the world’s first regenerative organic and A2 dairy ice cream brand — has closed an oversubscribed $11 million Series A funding round led by Imaginary Ventures, signaling that investor appetite for farm-to-freezer sustainability is very much alive. Founded in 2020, the California-based brand sources ingredients from regenerative organic farms focused on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon capture, and its products are now available in more than 3,000 retail locations — with year-over-year sales expected to double.

Link

ADM has partnered with Hill’s Pet Nutrition to enroll 16,000 acres of corn and soybean fields in Minnesota and Illinois — plus 2,500 acres in Hungary — in a multi-year regenerative agriculture pilot program, marking one of the first major efforts to embed soil-health practices into the pet food supply chain. Farmers will receive financial incentives and technical support to adopt regenerative practices, while ADM manages all data collection and outcome reporting.

Link

Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) and PepsiCo are expanding a regenerative agriculture partnership in Saskatchewan, one of the world’s leading canola-growing regions, targeting sustainable canola production for ingredients used in PepsiCo products across the US and Canada. After supporting 16 farmers across 25,000 acres in 2025 and producing roughly 26,000 tons of regeneratively grown canola, the companies plan to scale the program to 45,000 acres in 2026 — with outcomes tracked via the Cool Farm Tool to measure emissions reductions and biodiversity gains.

Link

Rachel’s Farm is a documentary film that follows director and actress Rachel Ward as she moves from her own self-described willful ignorance about conventional agriculture’s ecological damage toward becoming an advocate for regenerative and holistic farming practices on her own land.

Link

EXTRAS

1. Nitricity Secures $50M to Scale Organic Fertilizer Made From Waste [Link]

2. Maker’s Mark Honors America’s 250th with Limited Release [Link]

Venture of the Week
Groundbreaking Organizations.

Regenerative California

Regenerative California is a nonprofit working to build a regenerative economy that uplifts communities and strengthens California’s food and agriculture system, using a 70-acre demonstration farm in Monterey County — home to the Salinas Valley, the so-called “salad bowl of the world” — as a real-world testing ground for regenerative organic practices.

https://www.regenerativecalifornia.org/

This Week In Regenerative Agriculture is published by Why Regenerative. It is compiled by Jackson Baris with ChatGPT. Sign up for our newsletter here.