After a challenging planting year and market volatility, U.S. wheat farmers are facing the prospect of one of the lowest years of production since 1970, pressuring margins and investments in farming operations. However, a cross-industry collaboration is helping wheat farmers adopt sustainable farming practices and providing a financial boost just when they need.
On July 15, commodity giant ADM, retailer Walmart, and consumer packaged goods company General Mills revealed a project to support regenerative agriculture on 40,000 acres with a focus on Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri wheat farmers near ADM’s flour mills, Paul Scheetz, director of regenerative agriculture for ADM, told AgNavigator.
ADM and General Mills have worked together on previous regen ag projects, and General Mills and Walmart committed to supporting regen ag practices on 600,000 shared acres by 2030. Today, General Mills and Walmart are supporting 560,000 wheat acres, with the ADM program allowing them to hit this goal.
As part of the regen ag program, the companies will offer technical support to farmers, which will largely focus on cover crop adoption, fertilizer efficiency, and reducing tillage, Scheetz said.
Non-profits American Farmland Trust and Ducks Unlimited will provide technical assistance for the initial projects, while the companies will provide financial assistance to de-risk the shift to regen ag practices, he said. Additionally, farmers will have access to a range of regen ag practices to choose from, allowing them to pick what’s right for their farm, he added.
“We always like to start a program with financial incentives because there is always a productivity or a cost concern associated with doing these practices. It’s why not every farmer is doing them all the time,” Scheetz noted.
ADM’s regenerative agriculture efforts began around 2012 with its first pilot project before the company launched its official Re:generations framework in 2022. The commodity company spent nearly a decade on a fact-finding mission, working alongside companies like General Mills to learn the best regen ag practices.
“ADM’s been around for 120 years. What we’re really good at is setting markets for farmers, buying commodities, and turning them into agriculture ingredients, so delivery periods, quality, and price. ... One thing prior to 2012, we weren’t that great at is understanding the different field-level practices that farmers execute to make the commodities that we ultimately purchase.” Scheetz admitted.
Regen ag improves soil health, farmers’ margins
Financial support is not just important to ensure that farmers can handle the business risk of shifting to a new way of working, but the support also has a direct impact on farmers’ margins, Scheetz explained.
“The regen ag program is never successful unless it has a financial sustainability component to it, and 91% of all the farmers we enrolled, which is 3,000 last year, had responded that by enrolling in our project, it had a positive impact on their bottom line,” he elaborated.
This is important as wheat farmers “had a tough go at it in the last 12 months or so,” Scheetz noted.
This year, wheat farmers faced a confluence of factors that impacted production. U.S. wheat production is estimated to come in at 1.536 billion bushels in the 2026/27 marketing year, with a decline of 23% across all classes of wheat, according to USDA’s Wheat Outlook report.
“In a year where productivity is a concern because the weather didn’t necessarily cooperate — whether that’s dryness in Kansas or wetness in the Midwest that you’re seeing here right now when a farmer wanted to ultimately harvest their crop — being able to enroll in a program that has a positive impact on their bottom line is pretty significant,” Scheetz added.
