According to Forbes, the nonprofit Zero Foodprint, founded by chef Anthony Myint, has awarded over $8.4 million in grants to fund regenerative farming practices on more than 100,000 acres. The group partners with restaurants, supermarkets, and bars that add a 1% fee to customer bills—about 10 cents on a $10 purchase—and donates that money directly to farmers. Grants, capped at $25,000 each, fund specific practices like compost application or cover cropping, with impact assessed using tools like the COMET-Planner. To date, the model has sequestered over 230,000 tons of CO2. Myint started the group after realizing that even his meticulously sourced restaurant, The Perennial, wasn’t effectively scaling change, and he discovered a critical funding gap for farmers wanting to transition, which can cost $800 to $2,000 per acre.
The Premium Problem
Here’s the thing: we’ve been told for decades that the path to a better food system runs through our wallets. Buy organic, buy regenerative, and the market will magically transform. But the numbers tell a different story. After all this time, organic is still on just 1% of U.S. farmland. And as Myint points out, when a chef buys a “good” ingredient, it doesn’t necessarily help that farmer’s neighbor make a change. It’s a zero-sum game at the checkout aisle.
Worse, the economics are brutal for farmers. The USDA says they only get about 16 cents of every food dollar. So even if you pay a premium, most of that extra cash gets eaten up by processing, transport, and marketing. The farmer’s margin for risky, upfront investment in new practices is tiny. That’s why the direct grant model is so intriguing. It bypasses the broken market mechanics and funds the transition directly. It’s not about creating a luxury product; it’s about treating soil health as a public good that deserves funding.
A Different Kind of Certification
Myint’s philosophy on what counts as “regenerative” is refreshingly pragmatic. He’s not chasing purity. Think of it like getting healthy: you start by going for a walk, not by running a marathon. If a rancher raises cattle on grass for the first year before sending them to a feedlot, that first year is still a win. It’s progress on 20 acres of a 100-acre farm.
This is where Zero Foodprint’s Restore Grants come in. They fund those specific, incremental improvements without demanding a whole-farm overhaul. It removes the all-or-nothing pressure that keeps conventional farmers from even starting. And by using tools like COMET-Planner to estimate carbon impact, they’re trying to bring data-driven accountability to the process. It’s a far cry from the sometimes-vague promises on a product label.
Can This Model Scale?
Look, the success stories like Hickory Nut Gap Farms are amazing. They’ve built a whole regional network and gotten their meat into Whole Foods. But as co-owner Jamie Ager admits, it’s brutally hard. You need aligned customers, consistent supply, and a totally different cost structure. It’s a niche model, not a system-wide fix.
So is a 1% fee the answer? It’s clever. The amount is small enough to be painless for consumers—it’s basically spare change—but aggregated across many partners, it becomes significant. And it frames the climate cost of food as a shared responsibility, not a luxury tax on the conscious consumer. But the big question is volume. Can they recruit enough restaurants and supermarkets to move the needle on a national scale? The potential is huge—improving soil carbon could offset a massive chunk of emissions—but so is the need.
The Bigger Picture
Ultimately, Zero Foodprint’s approach highlights a massive systemic failure. We subsidize conventional agriculture but expect farmers to self-fund the transition to climate-smart practices. Myint’s model is a fascinating patch, a way to crowdsource agricultural R&D from the dinner table.
But it also exposes the need for bigger policy shifts. The farm economy’s structure is the real bottleneck. Direct grants, whether from nonprofit fees or government programs, might be the only way to bridge the gap until the market catches up. The lesson? Don’t just vote with your fork. Sometimes, you need to fund the farm directly. And maybe that starts with a dime on your dinner bill.
