B Lab Voices: This is a personal perspective from an employee at B Lab, the nonprofit behind Certified B Corporations. In this series, we invite individual B Lab employees to share their experiences, inspiration, hopes, and challenges as they work toward a more inclusive and regenerative world. This edition of B Lab Voices is from Andy Fyfe of B Lab Growth.

In The Total Economy, Wendell Berry writes: “The ‘environmental crisis’ has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature.” We have, Berry says, falsely assumed that nature is a bottomless reservoir of raw resources.

We have the ability to make a difference: In Project Drawdown’s listing of the top 80 changes we can make today around the globe to reverse climate change, switching to regenerative agriculture ranks at №11. The project’s research predicts that shifting to no tillage, diverse cover crops, no use of off-farm chemical inputs, and other regenerative agriculture practices could reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 23.15 gigatons by the year 2050.

Seems like a pretty big deal — especially considering we have to figure out ways to grow food in order to survive amid our changing climate.

As of today, however, the biggest players in the agricultural industry and U.S. farm policies do not support regenerative agriculture. Large-acreage, highly mechanized farms growing one crop, known as “monocultures,” and owned by fewer and fewer corporations are still the norm. This creates surplus and drives down prices to remain competitive. Berry’s writing goes on: “Low prices encourage overproduction as producers attempt to make up their losses ‘on volume,’ and overproduction inevitably makes for low prices. The land-using economies thus spiral downward as the money economy of the exploiters spirals upward.”

In this system, farmers are being asked to take a big risk to make the switch to regenerative practices.

They must change the operations of their farms, diversify their crops, look at permaculture, perhaps change the equipment they use, and find new markets to sell their products. This can be especially difficult during the years it takes to transition a farm from one system to another. Often, farmers cannot financially handle the transition itself, even if the potential market premiums of producing in a regenerative fashion would be beneficial, as well as positive for the environment, community and customers.

This is an important change in an industry we literally cannot live without. So why is it being shouldered by a shrinking group with limited capacity to make the transition? It isn’t feasible to think farmers will be able to make this switch alone.