Can Regenerative Coffee Farming Deliver Living Incomes? It Depends, Analysis Shows
Two of coffee’s biggest sustainability concepts — regenerative agriculture and living income for farmers — have been gaining traction in parallel in recent years.
“These interventions support one another in that farmers with higher and more stable incomes have greater capacity to continue to invest in their farms,”
A new paper from the nonprofits TechnoServe and Sustainable Food Lab brings those ideas together, asking how far regenerative farming can actually move smallholder coffee households toward a decent standard of living in specific coffee-producing countries.
The paper builds on TechnoServe’s 2025 “Regenerative Coffee Investment Case,” while adding Sustainable Food Lab’s living-income framing and analysis. The paper relies on modeling for “typical” coffee-farming households rather than actual field measurements of household income changes tied to regenerative agriculture adoption.
The core finding of the new paper is that regenerative agriculture could substantially narrow — and in some countries eliminate — the living income gap for typical smallholder coffee-farming households. It also warns that farm practices alone are not enough considering persistently low farmgate prices throughout the coffee sector.
Country-by-Country Analysis
The paper applies a living-income lens to modeled coffee-farming households in Honduras, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Peru and Indonesia.
The analysis found that, before adopting regenerative practices, the typical coffee-farming household in all seven countries fell short of a living income. Peru and Indonesia showed the largest gaps, with typical farming households earning just 26% of the living income benchmark at baseline, while Vietnam showed the smallest gap, with typical households earning 81% of the benchmark.
Under the paper’s modeling, typical households in Ethiopia and Vietnam could cross the living income threshold by adopting recommended regenerative practices. In Honduras and Kenya, the gap would narrow significantly. In Uganda, Peru and Indonesia, however, the report found that typical households would still earn roughly half the living income benchmark after adoption, due largely to small farm sizes, low productivity or high production costs.
Price Matters, Too
The paper defines living income as the income required to afford a decent standard of living in a given place. Unlike a single-crop farm-profit calculation, the living-income approach considers household income from multiple sources, including coffee, other farm production and off-farm earnings.
In an announcement of the report, Sustainable Food Lab Program Manager Molly Leavens said the living-income framework “helps companies, governments and other stakeholders understand their respective roles and responsibilities in supporting income improvement.”
A critical variable in all of these projections is coffee prices, which the paper addresses directly.
The income projections use long-term average farmgate prices, then test what happens when those prices shift. Under that baseline modeling, typical farmers in Ethiopia and Vietnam cross the living income threshold with regenerative adoption.
Run the same regenerative adoption scenario with farmgate prices 25% higher, and Honduras also crosses the threshold, while Kenya and Peru narrow their gaps substantially. The paper separately notes that a 50% price increase — similar to the historic price rally many farmers experienced in 2025 — would leave only typical households in Uganda and Indonesia below the living income benchmark.
Drop prices 25%, and the gains from regenerative practices are largely wiped out, returning most countries to living income gaps similar to or worse than baseline.
The implication is that the income benefits of regenerative agriculture are substantial, but they sit on top of a price floor that farmers don’t control. That makes procurement practices — such as minimum volume commitments, price floors and quality-based premiums — as important to the living income equation as agronomic change.
“These interventions support one another in that farmers with higher and more stable incomes have greater capacity to continue to invest in their farms,” Leavens said. “Supporting the regenerative transition is an opportunity in any value chain.”
The paper was written by Leavens, Kealy Sloan and Christina Archer of Sustainable Food Lab, and Paul Stewart and Rebecca Manning of TechnoServe.
