Starting from Outcomes: How a Colombian Hub Built its Regeneration Indicators

In March 2026, more than 60 people gathered at the Alliance Bioversity & CIAT campus in Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Farmers from several municipalities of the department, the departmental Secretary of Rural Development, Agriculture and Fisheries, on behalf of the Governor of Valle del Cauca, soil scientists, university researchers, private sector representatives, regenerative companies and members of the regional Regenerative Network (Red de Regeneradores) came together for the first gathering of the Valle del Cauca Regenerative Hub, a two-year initiative coordinated by Alliance Bioversity & CIAT, E3-Ecology, Economy and Ethics, the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU Colombia), and the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of Science (FUNDAEC).

Their task, which is part of an effort supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, was to begin agreeing on how to measure regenerative and agroecological practices across the territory’s farms to better support underserved and climate-vulnerable communities. The Regen10 Outcomes Framework was introduced as the starting point for that conversation. What followed illustrates what the Framework is designed to do, and what it is not.

It is not a checklist. The workshop did not hand participants a fixed set of indicators to adopt. Instead, posters displaying the Framework’s farm-level dimensions were placed around the room, and participants moved between them, marking which outcomes they already measured, which felt relevant to Valle del Cauca, and where something was missing. Then, in six facilitated groups, they used the twelve dimensions as a structure for a harder conversation: which indicators apply to the farms, which need adapting, and which dimensions are significant to the farms that the global reference does not fully capture. The Framework worked as a conversation structure, holding a complete picture of regeneration in view while local knowledge filled in the detail.

A few things stood out. 

The conversation did not stay where it started. Participants came in focused on the biophysical— on soil, water, and biodiversity. But the twelve-dimension structure pulled the discussion outward. Water emerged as a shared resource needing community monitoring. Economic viability surfaced repeatedly, with participants insisting that regeneration and agroecology have to remain financially viable for producers and proposing indicators on hidden household savings, access to rural finance, and vulnerability to input costs. Governance, community, and the role of farmers and workers all entered the frame.

Producers brought indicators, contextual knowledge, and implementation concerns that a technical team alone would likely have missed: the count of water sources per vereda across wet and dry seasons, the value of campesino knowledge, the practical limits of who collects data. And participants made clear where local knowledge and territorial priorities needed to take the conversation further than the Framework could on its own.

They flagged intergenerational continuity, keeping young people connected to regenerative and agroecological practices, as under-represented. They wanted indicators for long-term landscape restoration, particularly recovery of the Tropical Dry Forest, that outlast any single project. They argued that the appropriation of knowledge and local leadership, not just participation in training, should be measurable. This feedback matters, and it is exactly the kind of input that keeps a global reference honest.

By the end of the day, participants had selected priority indicators across biodiversity, soil, water, community, governance, and agricultural inputs, and producers across the department had volunteered their farms as pilot sites for baseline and monitoring measurements.

The Framework did not tell Valle del Cauca what regeneration should mean. It gave the territory a structure to decide for itself, while keeping the full breadth of regeneration in view. That fuller view not only clarified what mattered most locally; it also exposed the system-level gaps that others, in policy, finance, and supply chains, would need to help close. That is the point. Before you decide what counts as regenerative, you need a shared sense of what regeneration and agroecology should deliver, and then the work of prioritization belongs to all of the food system actors.

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