Climate Week NYC has become an increasingly important forum for the food and agriculture industry as companies grapple with the twin challenge of reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint while building more resilient supply chains.
But this year, rather than debating the merits of sustainability commitments or regenerative agriculture, attention was turning to the practicalities of delivering change at scale: who pays farmers to transition, how outcomes are measured, what buyers are prepared to reward and where the commercial returns lie.
For Tim Weaver, chief strategy officer at soil biologicals company Holganix, that was evidence of a market beginning to mature. Ethan Soloviev, chief innovation officer at sustainability intelligence platform HowGood, detected a similar shift, with food companies becoming more focused on delivery and procurement decisions than headline commitments.
AgNavigator asked the pair what they learned from Climate Week, whether corporate money is really beginning to reach farmers, and what could derail the momentum.
‘A market growing up’: From ambition to delivery
AN: Coming out of Climate Week NYC, what felt different about the conversation this year compared with 12 months ago?
Tim Weaver: Ag clearly moved into the next phase of its sustainability journey in 2026, and it showed in New York. A year ago, much of the focus was on what neither ag nor climate wanted, on what wasn’t working. This year it was about delivering solutions at scale: who pays, who measures, who benefits from risk reduction. It felt like a market growing up and focusing on what we all want. Ambition is important and usually free. Infrastructure is essential, and it comes with investment and an ROI expectation. I heard “soil as infrastructure” in a wide variety of conversations this year. That maturity felt different. It felt good.
Ethan Soloviev: The tone in the food industry is resolute. Last year a lot of companies told us they’d keep doing the work, just more quietly. This year they came out and said it publicly. Aldi made public commitments for the first time in its history, and Walmart showed up across multiple sessions talking about active work in its supply chain. The conversation has also moved on from whether detailed product carbon footprints are possible. They’re expected now, and retailers are asking for them. Our team kept describing it the same way: less about big headline commitments, more about delivery.
Is corporate money finally reaching the farm?
AN: After Climate Week, are you more or less confident that corporates are willing to put meaningful money behind that transition?
Ethan Soloviev: More confident. The money is starting to come in specific structures instead of pilot budgets. At one closed-door session with farmers and procurement leads, a chief procurement officer from a multi-billion-dollar company asked the farmers whether they needed “three, five or seven-year contracts”. Long-term contracting no longer sounds like a stretch. We also saw a new equipment financing instrument for farmers launched with PepsiCo, and a dairy cooperative selling over a billion litres of milk with a 30% lower footprint to Swedish retailers who agreed to pay more for it. None of these covers the whole transition on its own; the encouraging part is that blended finance is big enough to cover the gap that gets farmers over the line, but much, much more is still needed.
Tim Weaver: More confident in the money. Less confident in the press releases. Corporates are saying less publicly, but quiet isn’t the same as absent. Capital is moving where the return is legible. Activity is increasing around supply-chain resilience, input costs, and yield improvement in both quantity and quality. When soil health shows up as risk reduction on a balance sheet, it gets funded. The money is real. It just wants to be called something other than just climate.
From measuring footprints to changing procurement
AN: Are food companies changing what they actually buy and how they source ingredients as a result of better sustainability data, or is there still a gap between measurement and procurement decisions?
Tim Weaver: We’re seeing a shift from measuring sustainability in dollars and acres to measuring it in outcomes. The gap isn’t between measurement and procurement. It’s between measurement and accountability. Companies move money when soil health is priced as risk and reward, through multi-year contracts and pay-for-outcome partnerships tied to verified results. Supply-chain resilience doesn’t let companies treat a commodity as an annual purchase in a vacuum. The data now lets them see farm soil as a factory floor: verifiable, multi-year production capacity worth ongoing investment.
Ethan Soloviev: There’s still a gap, but it’s getting smaller. Measurement across the supply chain is becoming standard, and more companies understand that you can’t plan Scope 3 reductions without knowing the footprint of each material you buy. The actual reductions are still small if you look at them in isolation. We think of them as the bottom of an S-curve. What’s changing is that procurement teams are realizing they can often buy the same ingredient at the same price with a lower footprint, as long as they have supplier-specific data to tell the difference. We’re seeing more of that every month.
Can regenerative agriculture, AgTech and mainstream farming converge?
AN: We’ve heard concerns that there is a disconnect between regenerative agriculture, mainstream farming and agtech. Is that fair? If so, how can these groups converge more effectively?
Tim Weaver: Fair, but overstated. The disconnect is mostly vocabulary. Regenerative sometimes sounds like a philosophy. Farming runs on margins. Agtech sometimes builds for the invention instead of the farmer. When successful, they all converge on yield. Farmers don’t adopt practices because they’re labeled regenerative. They adopt them because they work, pay and reduce risk. Convergence happens when regenerative stops being a separate category and simply becomes good agronomy with better measurement. Real results at scale are the common language that unites tech, farmers and corporates. I heard that conversation again and again in New York.
Ethan Soloviev: There was more of a disconnect a few years ago, when everyone was looking for the one solution to rally behind. That’s shifted. People now accept there are many viable, scalable approaches, and that makes it easier for different groups to find where they fit. What’s interesting is how little we heard about AI this year. Nobody thinks technology will solve this for us; it’s a tool, and the real work is people on farms and leaders in the industry agreeing on what gets measured and rewarded. Convergence happens when you put farmers and buyers in the same room around actual contracts, and when data is good enough that insurers and lenders can price risk at the field level instead of the county level.
‘The questions got better’: Reasons for optimism
AN: What was the most encouraging thing you heard or saw during Climate Week? Has anything made you more optimistic about the direction of travel?
Tim Weaver: The questions got better. Fewer people asked whether soil matters. More asked how to price it, finance it and verify it. That’s the shift from belief to underwriting, and underwriting is where capital moves at scale. That shift helps everyone in the value chain.
Ethan Soloviev: A small roundtable procurement session. Eight farmers, four procurement professionals, and a senior buyer saying the friction is lower than it’s ever been and they’ll make longer contracts work if the product fits.
The risks: Complexity, tight budgets and a ticking 2030 clock
AN: Conversely, what worried you? What is the biggest risk of the momentum around climate and regenerative agriculture stalling over the next 12 months?
Tim Weaver: The biggest risk is perfection fatigue. We’ve seen sustainability markets built in a language almost nobody can read: acronyms stacked on methodologies stacked on standards still being rewritten. We all want the highest-integrity practices, but if the rules chasing perfection get too heavy, the farmer too often loses their voice and the money misses them. The risk isn’t that people stop wanting to do better. It’s that the system becomes so complex that no one gets paid for actually doing better. If the farmer can’t see the value in plain terms within a season, momentum stalls, regardless of what’s said on stage in New York. I loved seeing the common-sense meetings this year, where farmers, corporates and rule-makers sat at the same table and had honest conversations that move past perfection to impactful action.
My biggest hope is farmers keeping their seats at the table. Not as case studies or photo ops, but as joyful participants in the deal. For years the climate conversation has been about agriculture without agriculture in the room. That’s starting to change, and it’s the most important change there is. My biggest concern is that we let complexity win, building frameworks, standards and acronyms faster than we build farmer income and real resilience for companies and nations. We all win when financial sustainability and climate sustainability are results of the same mission.
Ethan Soloviev: Timing. The average farm transition takes around five years to show up on a company’s carbon balance sheet. Anything a company wants counted by 2030 should already be underway with farmers. Delays now don’t show up for years, so it’s easy to underestimate the cost of waiting. The other risk is budgets. Many sustainability teams are going into next year with flat funding and still trying to win internal buy-in. If that turns into spreading money thinly across new pilots instead of scaling what already works, momentum will slow.
