After Organic: What ROC Is Trying to Do

While I was writing the Chanel and Lammermoor piece, I came across an acronym I didn't recognise. ROC. It appeared in Chanel's stated goals for the farm — they want Lammermoor to achieve it — but none of the coverage explained what it actually was. So I went and found out.

ROC stands for Regenerative Organic Certified. And the more I read about it, the more it looked like a direct response to something I'd been thinking about since writing the history of the word organic — that the philosophy moved on while the label stayed behind. It turns out some people noticed the same thing and decided to do something about it.

In 2018, a group of organisations gathered at a trade show in California to announce the certification. ROC was led by the Rodale Institute, with Dr. Bronner's and Patagonia as co-founders. Other founding members included Compassion in World Farming and Demeter, the biodynamic certifier. Not a government programme. Not a marketing initiative. A deliberate attempt to build something higher than what organic had become.

The structure of it matters. ROC uses the USDA Certified Organic standard as a baseline — you have to already be certified organic before you can apply. Then it adds three additional pillars: soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness for farmers and workers. The USDA label, as it stands, addresses none of those last two in any meaningful way, and addresses soil health only partially.

On soil health, ROC requires practices like cover crops, crop rotation, and conservation tillage — and excludes soil-less growing systems entirely. Hydroponics can be certified organic under USDA rules. It cannot be ROC. That's a meaningful line to draw. Northbourne's entire argument was that the farm is a living system rooted in soil. A hydroponic operation, however clean and pesticide-free, is not that.

On animal welfare, ROC protects the "Five Freedoms," requires grass-fed and pasture-raised conditions, and prohibits concentrated animal feeding operations entirely. On worker fairness, it requires fair wages, safe conditions, and freedom of association — things that have never appeared in any organic standard anywhere.

The founders were explicit about why they built it. They wanted to protect the term "regenerative" from going the same way as "organic" — getting picked up by corporate interests and diluted into a marketing claim. By linking regenerative and organic together in a single certified standard, they were trying to make sure the two couldn't be separated.

It's worth knowing who these founders are. The Rodale Institute traces back to the early 1940s — J.I. Rodale bought a farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania in 1941 and launched Organic Farming and Gardening magazine in 1942, two years after Northbourne published Look to the Land. The Institute itself was formally established in 1947. The term "regenerative organic" itself was coined by Robert Rodale, J.I.'s son, to describe a kind of farming that goes beyond sustainable.

Dr. Bronner's is a soap company that has spent decades converting its entire supply chain — coconut oil in Sri Lanka, palm oil in Ghana, mint oil in India — to regenerative organic. Patagonia is the outdoor clothing brand that converted its entire cotton supply chain to organic in the 1990s and has been pushing further ever since. These are not organisations that arrived at regenerative farming as a brand exercise.

The scale it has reached in a few years is worth noting. ROC has now certified 438 farms and ranches worldwide, alongside roughly 61,000 smallholder farmers — a separate category, largely in developing countries supplying certified ingredients — across nearly 20 million acres. Over 340 brands are now licensed. ROC products saw a 22% increase in buyers in 2025, outpacing Fair Trade USA at 10.7% growth and USDA Organic at 6.6% — still small relative to the overall organic market, but the trajectory matters.

There are fair questions to ask about it. ROC certification costs money, which creates a barrier for small farmers — though the Regenerative Organic Alliance has a cost-share fund to help. The certification is still US-centric in its architecture, even as it certifies farms globally. And like any certification, it measures compliance with a standard at a point in time, not the living reality of a farm day to day.

But the intent of it is worth sitting with. Someone looked at what the organic label had become — a government-regulated marketing claim attached to industrial producers following minimum standards — and decided to build something that actually meant what the word was supposed to mean. A farm as a living system. Soil that regenerates. Animals with genuine welfare. Workers treated fairly. The whole thing connected, as Northbourne described it, like an organism.

If you've been following NZ's own food story, there's a local thread here. Lammermoor Station in Central Otago — the country's largest organic farm — is already on this path. Chanel's recent investment in the farm came with a stated goal of achieving ROC certification, which would make it the world's first ROC-certified fine wool farm. A French fashion house betting serious capital on a Central Otago high country station reaching one of the highest agricultural standards in the world.

If you want to find ROC products, the Regenerative Organic Alliance maintains a directory at regenorganic.org. The brands — Patagonia Provisions, Dr. Bronner's, Lundberg rice, Applegate meats — are worth knowing about when you encounter them.