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Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) is one of the most rigorous standards in agriculture: USDA organic certification as the baseline, with three pillars — soil health, animal welfare and social fairness — required on top.
That is the point. It is also the obstacle.
“Our mission is to accelerate the transition to regenerative organic agriculture globally,” said Christopher Gergen, CEO of the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), which oversees the label. “This means meeting farmers where they are, maintaining the rigor of ROC while reducing the cost and complexity of certification, and increasing access to new market opportunities.”
To that end, ROA has just launched The Journey to Regenerative Organic Certified® (Journey to ROC™).
It is not a “junior” certification but a structured pathway of individualized, year-by-year plans toward ROC’s three pillars, built for farms at any distance from the standard.
In some cases, that means a conventional grower adopting practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage and a move away from synthetic inputs. In others, it means a farm already certified organic that needs time to strengthen its social fairness and regenerative practices. The majority of farms in the 2026 cohort fall into the second group.
“As the name suggests, it is all about the journey away from industrial, conventional agriculture no matter where you start,” said Gergen.
It also lowers the cost. ROA now recognizes other credible third-party standards — starting with Regenagri, the only one that covers all three pillars — so certifiers can audit only the gap instead of duplicating work a farm has already paid for.
Journey to ROC, however, is not a product claim, and brands in the pilot cannot use the ROC seal.
WHY THE NEED
Reaching ROC is not one hurdle but a stack of them, and where a farm starts determines how tall the stack is.
For a conventional grower, three years of transition only reaches organic certification. ROC’s three pillars sit on top of that.
“Many conventional farmers were interested, but the jump from non-organic to ROC was too hard,” said LaRhea Pepper, an organic cotton farmer, board vice chair of the Regenerative Organic Alliance and co-founder/former CEO of the Textile Exchange. “They needed a step-by-step plan, and they had to be reassured there was a market for their products. As farmers, we can’t invest on a ‘maybe.'”
For a farm already certified organic, the distance is shorter but still real. ROA’s own mapping found that most farms entering ROC arrive from exactly that position.
What both groups lacked was a defined route — a sequence of steps, with a timeline attached, that a farm could commit to before it was ready to certify.
WHO PAYS FOR THE JOURNEY
ROA built its 2026 cohort around brands that could be dependable market partners, some with experience converting farmland to organic: New Barn Organics and NestFresh Eggs, evanhealy, ECOfashion Corp, Maggie’s Organics, Bergman/Rivera, Buena Vida Specialty Coffee and the RegenTea Coalition.
Those brands also agreed to cover farmers’ out-of-pocket transition costs, so growers do not lose money moving toward ROC. Several brands are supplying technical assistance as well, a gap ROA acknowledges it does not fill.
Nothing obligates a farmer to sell to the brand that financed their certification, which is why the pilot leaned on long-standing relationships.
“This pilot works because we already know these farms,” said Marci Zaroff, founder and CEO of ECOfashion Corp. “This is not something a brand can do at arm’s length, and it is not something most brands can afford to do alone.”
The cost-sharing, however, was a one-time exception to get the pilot off the ground, not the model going forward.
ROA is writing grant proposals to fund future transitions and is modeling a ROC farmer fund on NRCS Organic Management 823 deployed in the Dakotas, a standard growers could apply to directly without brands absorbing the cost.
With ROC now covering more than 22 million acres, 55,869 smallholder farmers and 388 licensed brands, the certification has come a long way since its founding in 2017.
Journey to ROC is a bet on how it grows from here — not by lowering the bar, but by mapping the route to it.
 | With gratitude,  Max Goldberg, Founder |
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