reNature chooses Overyield to scale the transition to regenerative agriculture.

At the Regenerative Agriculture & Food Systems Summit in Chicago, USA, reNature announced a further collaboration with Propagate to use their designing and forecasting tool, Overyield, to scale up the transition to regenerative agriculture.

reNature's COO, Guus ter Haar, presented reNature’s path to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture by embracing Overyield, Propagate’s tool for farm design and forecasting, at the Regenerative Agriculture & Food Systems Summit in Chicago. The Summit’s main focus of unifying the agri-food industry and providing a platform to drive progress was a fitting environment to make such an announcement. The Summit’s objective of brainstorming strategies and taking concrete steps towards moving regenerative practices from niche to commonplace, further amplified the need for such a platform and this partnership.

The collaboration will apply Overyield to (semi-) tropical regenerative agriculture, accelerating the scaling up of reNature’s projects as well as presenting regenerative farmers with insight into the performance of the new system. reNature and the Overyield team will elaborate the tool with (semi-)tropical species and regen ag techniques like intercropping, crop rotation, and cover cropping. 

The current regenerative movement is focused on small-scale, complex projects or large-scale monitoring and claims. Though tangible results and agreeing on a standard are important, this is only partly the challenge the transition to regen ag faces. The real challenge is to convince farmers to change their land into something they have little experience with and can’t predict. Farmers want to know whether the system will be profitable. reNature has chosen Overyield to answer that question. By designing a regenerative system and overlaying it on the farmer’s existing plot, the tool will show a virtual farm with the costs and revenue over a period of time. "Ultimately, the farmer can see with their own eyes that the transition to regenerative farming will pay itself back in the end.", according to Marco de Boer, CEO @reNature. 

Overyield is built to develop and forecast tree-production-focused agroforestry systems. To use the tool for reNature’s elaborate regenerative models, the tool must be filled and tested with many (semi-)tropical species. reNature’s science team will enter the required data to develop trustworthy predictions on workload, harvest cycles, and outcomes, such as 30-year cash flows and metrics on carbon sequestration potential. In return, the Overyield team will support reNature with adjustments to fit regen ag techniques like high-density intercropping, crop rotation, cover cropping, and seed mixtures. 

reNature announced the collaboration with Propagate on the stage of the second edition of the Regenerative Agriculture & Food Systems Summit to an audience of over 300 global food and beverage brands, ingredient suppliers, and food producers. reNature's COO, Guus ter Haar, made a strong case for accelerating the change to regenerative agriculture to an audience made up of brands from the likes of Danone, Iroquois Valley Farms, PepsiCo, Rodale Institute, General Mills, WWF, McDonald’s, National Young Farmer’s Coalition, Nestle, and many more. The current fragmented and small-scale initiatives do not lead to the necessary change in agricultural practices. Time is running out for farmers. They will be unable to produce enough food even with more artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Nature-inclusive methods are not a hip trend or a way to green-wash; they are the only way to keep the system running.

The use of Overyield is part of reNature’s growth strategy. It makes it easier to plan and develop larger areas in one go and adjust the proposed model systems with the farmers in the field. Past projects of reNature have proven that regenerative designs require adjustments based on local conditions, which only farmers know. Basic regenerative designs form the base for the calculations, which can then be validated to match the field’s real situation. reNature aims to speed up the conversion of conventional to regenerative by adding automation to the mix.

About reNature:

reNature assists farmers, agribusiness, and corporates in transitioning to regenerative agriculture from design & implementation to scale. It accelerates this through access to finance & off-takers, premiums for quality, and payment for impact. By doing so, reNature improves economic resilience, soil health, biodiversity, and food security in farming communities.

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