In 2020 we’re likely to see the label ROC added to products, and it’s a really good move. ROC stands for Regenerative Organic Certification. Regenerative, as in healing, nourishing, and building; supportive of life cycles and biodiversity, and fair for humans and better for animals.
The term was created in 2018 by the Rodale Institute, and is the certification now overseen by the Regenerative Organic Alliance.
While organic agriculture is better than conventional one, it is not always proactively building, nourishing, and supporting the ecosystem in a holistic way. This is the gap that regenerative agriculture seeks to ameliorate.
ROC was established in 2017 by a group of farmers, business leaders, and experts in soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness — now known as the Regenerative Organic Collective.
They believe that healthy soils are extremely important, both for the sustainability of crop growth and nutrition, but also because truly healthy soils act as large carbon sinks for our increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere.
Agricultural soils are among the planet’s largest reservoirs of carbon and hold potential for expanded carbon sequestration (CS), and thus provide a prospective way of mitigating the increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2.
It is estimated that soils can sequester around 20 Pg C in 25 years, more than 10 % of the anthropogenic emissions.
It’s hard to argue with ROC’s vision for the world free of:
- Poisonous chemicals
- Factory farming
- Exploitation
- Soil degradation
- Habitat destruction
- Pollution, short-term thinking, corporate bullies, greenwashing, and fake food.
Making a big shift away from chemical-intensive and fossil-fuel driven farming into a system that is holistic and regenerative is literally about saving the remaining soil we have and protecting the planet for generations of eaters to come.
There is no official timeline yet, but hopefully we’ll start to see this important label in the final months of 2020.
This is a Businesswire Feed; edited by Clean-Future Team