IN Brief:
- The study draws on verified data from 1,262 farms across 331,600 hectares in France.
- Highly regenerative farms recorded smaller yield declines than least regenerative farms during drought.
- The work frames agricultural resilience as a measurable sourcing and financial risk factor.
Soil Capital has released early findings from a large European farm dataset showing that regenerative farming practices can help protect crop production during drought, strengthening the case for raw material resilience in food manufacturing supply chains.
The analysis covers independently verified, field-level data from 1,262 farms across 331,600 hectares in France between 2021 and 2024. Soil Capital describes the dataset as one of the first European datasets of its scale linking farming practices, yields, and soil conditions at individual field level. The crop scope includes winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed, spring barley, grain maize, and potatoes, placing the findings across raw materials used in bakery, snacks, oils, starch, and prepared foods.
In the area where the most detailed evaluation was conducted, yields of the crop most affected by the 2023 drought fell by 22% on the least regenerative farms, compared with an 8% decline on highly regenerative farms. Across the broader French dataset, regenerative practices reduced drought-related yield losses by at least 10% in around 85% of cases across cereal crops in departments affected by significant drought.
The analysis uses a composite index of regenerative transition practices, including cover cropping, reduced tillage intensity, residue retention, and organic matter application. Drought exposure was assessed using the Combined Drought Indicator developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, while resilience was measured by comparing farm yield performance during drought-affected years with non-affected years.
The findings are observational rather than controlled experimental trial results, so they do not reduce drought performance to one practice or one agronomic input. Soil type, crop type, rotation, management history, local weather, and harvest conditions all shape yield. The scale of the dataset still gives the work commercial weight because regenerative agriculture is being measured against production and financial resilience, rather than treated only as an environmental preference.
For food manufacturers, climate exposure is already moving through procurement, ingredient pricing, supplier negotiations, stockholding, reformulation, and customer commitments. A bakery business exposed to wheat quality variation, a snack manufacturer buying potatoes or rapeseed oil, or an ingredients producer reliant on cereal inputs will feel yield instability through cost, availability, and specification performance before it appears in a sustainability report.
Resilience data also changes the character of supplier discussions. Regenerative sourcing programmes have often been framed around soil health, carbon, biodiversity, or brand positioning. Those remain part of the picture, but a verified link to yield stability brings the issue into contract design, supplier assessment, crop planning, insurance discussions, and risk-adjusted pricing. Where field-level evidence is available, sourcing resilience becomes easier to compare, price, and manage.
Longer-term sourcing commitments are already becoming more visible across food supply chains, as shown by Lidl GB’s five-year commitment to British berry sourcing. The Soil Capital data sits further upstream, where the security of raw material supply depends on farming systems that can remain productive under more volatile weather.
Cereal and bakery supply chains are particularly exposed. European milling wheat and feed grain systems have already been affected by weather volatility, fertiliser cost swings, energy prices, and geopolitical disruption. Drought resilience data gives processors a more practical basis for evaluating which regions, farm systems, and suppliers may be better able to maintain output during stress events.
The next stage will require validation beyond France and deeper crop-level analysis. Soil Capital is working with academic partners, including KU Leuven, to expand economic and statistical interpretation of the data. That work will need to separate the effects of individual practices, assess regional variation, and test whether the observed resilience holds under different drought severities and crop systems.
Food manufacturers increasingly need sourcing data that explains why a raw material supply is vulnerable, not only that it is vulnerable. Regenerative agriculture will have to prove itself in yield, quality, economics, and verification. Where it can do so, it becomes part of procurement infrastructure rather than a label claim.
