Ag retailers already have what many consumer packaged goods (CPGs) companies are looking for: trusted producer relationships, technical expertise and a pathway to practice adoption. The challenge isn’t building those relationships or getting producers to adopt sustainable practices. It’s turning them into programs that deliver credible, reportable outcomes companies can confidently invest in.
Farmers across the country want to plant cover crops, reduce tillage, and restore native grasses. The upfront cost makes it hard to act on that. The transition cuts into profits before it improves them, and most producers don’t have the capital to absorb it on their own. As one farmer put it at a recent Food & Beverage forum panel: “Farmers take the majority of the risk and have little control over things like weather and markets.” And the numbers back that up, in a 2024 McKinsey survey found that only a third of U.S. farmers view cover crop ROI positively, and fewer than 60% say the same about reduced-till or no-till. Making it very difficult for farmers to want and make the initial investment without knowing there is a long-term support system helping them financially.
Retail ag companies are already working with producers who want to move toward sustainable practices. They have the farmer relationships, the agronomic expertise, and the day-to-day influence over which practices actually get adopted. The challenge is helping the producers they work with find funding to offset the cost of change.
The Disconnect
CPGs and food companies are exposed in the field, and they know it. The crops they buy are getting harder to source reliably as weather volatility hits yields, and the practices that build sustainable and resilient also steady the supply they depend on. That resilience case now sits alongside the emissions one. Scope 3 commitments are still in place, and Scope 3 can account for up to 95% of a food company’s total carbon footprint. But the harder problem is proximity; most companies lack a direct line to the farms in their supply chain. CDP data shows that as of 2022, 1 in 4 food companies disclosing Scope 3 emissions had no primary supply-chain data at all.
That leaves two sides that should fit together; on one side, retailers working with producers who are changing practices in the field. And the other, CPGs with a Scope 3 target and the appetite to invest in programs that deliver outcomes and can scale. What retailers wrestle with is turning what they do with farmers into something a CPG sustainability or procurement team will fund. Additionally, CPGs can’t easily evaluate programs they didn’t build and can’t verify.
What it Takes to Close the Gap
Most retailers can handle the technical assistance and enrollment themselves. Where they get stuck is turning that interventions into a claimable outcome; a company can actually use toward their sustainability commitments. That comes down to three approaches most programs often underestimate.
The first is quantification: how you generate a defensible emissions estimate for the producers in your program. Model selection, soil sampling design, and monitoring choices all shape the number, and they have to hold up across mixed soils, crops, and lease arrangements, not just in a controlled research trial.
The second is accounting: how you turn that quantified impact into an outcome a corporate can use. The same result has to fit into a Scope 3 inventory, inform what producers get paid, and show whether the program is working. Baselines and boundaries decide whether it holds together under scrutiny.
The third is protocol: which standards, verification requirements, and contract terms you follow to make the claim credible, and which you set aside because they aren’t practical on the ground. Get it wrong in either direction, and the program either can’t be defended or promoted.
Together, these three decide whether a program produces a claim an upstream customer will pay for. Peer-reviewed field data consistently shows that introducing cover crops reduces emissions at scale. Getting from that signal to a verified, reportable outcome is where most retailers get stuck, and it’s the piece they rarely have the infrastructure to build alone.
How to Make that Next Step
Retailers are already doing the hard part every day, standing behind the producers who count on them through the transition. The missing piece is the structure that turns that work into something an upstream customer will fund. That’s usually where an advisor who understands both the agronomy and what a corporate needs to hit its Scope 3 goals earns their place.
Before you take a program to a CPG, it’s worth knowing where it stands on quantification, accounting, and protocol. That’s the work we do with ag retailers. If you’re sizing up what you’ve built, let’s see where AgSpire fits. Reach out today, call/text 605.625.7255 or email info@agspire.com
SOURCES:
Statistics sourced from McKinsey (2024), WBCSD (2025), and CDP (2022).
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