Making Regenerative Agriculture Mainstream: A Conversation with Andy Cato
3rd September 2025
We caught up with Andy Cato to hear more about Wildfarmed’s journey and what led them to the decision to join SAI Platform earlier this year.
Andy Cato, farmer and co-founder of Wildfarmed, joined us at this year’s SAI Platform Annual Event, where he took part in a lively and thought-provoking debate on the motion: “Regenerative agriculture will never have sufficient demand to transform the food system.” As a member of the winning team against the motion, Andy brought critical understanding from both the field and the food industry.
What excites you about regenerative agriculture?
Despite the multiple crises we face, food and farming is a good news story. Just in my lifetime, the average size of wildlife populations has declined by two-thirds. Imagine if there was a technology that could reverse this biodiversity decline whilst simultaneously tackling climate change, mitigating flooding, providing resilience against drought, ensuring an abundant supply of clean water and nutritious food and saving the public purse billions of pounds.
Well, this invention exists in properly applied regenerative agriculture, and it does all of this whilst transferring agency back to farmers because it’s an approach based on observation and biology rather than input dependency and chemistry. If the economics reward growers for producing quality food in nature rich landscapes, we know all we need to know to create a resilient and abundant future.
At Wildfarmed, we work with 150 UK growers and over 1,000 businesses. We have seen that once the potential of producing food this way is understood, a field to plate supply chain with a shared mission is a powerful force for change.
Why have you joined SAI Platform?
Wildfarmed has spent years developing a scalable and affordable set of outcomes metrics that allow regeneration to be defined not by intentions but by results.
SAI Platform’s objective of industry-wide alignment to unlock regenerative agriculture at scale has also focused on an outcomes-based approach, so it’s a natural collaboration and great to be part of the Regenerating Together Programme.
The Wildfarmed team focused on measuring soil health, biodiversity and water outcomes as key ecosystem indicators and developed scalable, affordable ways to track them. As such, we are able to give our customers food with associated monitoring (MRV) data. When combined with our traceable supply chain, this unlocks powerful consumer messaging. For example, the annual insect survey carried out by Bristol University in 2024 found 3.7 times increase in bees in Wildfarmed compared to neighbouring conventional fields.
Outcome measurements also unlock additional revenue streams for farmers. For example, four of the big UK water companies are now financially rewarding Wildfarmed growers for preventing river pollution at the source.
By collaborating with SAI Platform and its members, we can help to shape a consistent, credible approach to regenerative agriculture that allows us to move from theory to action at scale.
What are your ambitions and hopes for the future of our food system, and why does it matter to you?
A Chief Procurement Officer of a large food business began a meeting quite bluntly. “My customers aren’t interested in regenerative farming.” To which I said, “that’s probably true, because most people have never heard of it and those that have would probably struggle to define it. But your customers do care about their health and nutrition, about rivers that they can swim in, water that’s safe to drink, and their food choices being part of nature recovery and the climate solution.”
Regenerative agriculture can do all of these things. Once you have seen this possibility, it’s impossible to stop trying to make it happen.
What are the biggest challenges facing our food system and how can we overcome them?
Farmers face huge financial pressure, having been paid at or below the cost of production for decades and now being asked to move from a system of yield at all costs to one that combines food resilience with nature recovery. Throw in increasingly wild weather and without new economics and a collaborative effort, what we are asking from farmers is completely unreasonable.
“We have seen at Wildfarmed that a combination of community, agronomy and financial support for farmers, combined with field to plate supply chains that connect with and empower consumers, can create a scalable pathway towards a future of quality food from nature rich landscapes.”
Key to this will be outcomes data, and being careful to ensure this data moves beyond carbon tunnel vision. History shows us the dangers of narrow optimisation, like 19th century forests cleared for fast growing coniferous monocultures, which had great yields and carbon numbers but were an ecological disaster.
It’s exciting to be collaborating with SAI Platform to help align the food industry behind a shared regenerative vision based on measured, trusted data and the fair farmer outcomes upon which this transition depends.