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For organisations

Our funders come from many sectors including food and agriculture, utilities, water, insurance and local governments – collaborating on diverse challenges and outcomes.

Diageo, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are among the global brands investing in LENs. Utility companies include Affinity Water, Anglian Water, SSEN and Yorkshire Water. In addition, local councils and public bodies fund farmers and support our operations – for example, Perth & Kinross Council, The Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland, West Northamptonshire Council, and York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority.

See our full list of partners here.

Co-funding regenerative agriculture

With LENs, organisations can co-fund regenerative agriculture to mitigate environmental risks with outcomes they can report.

Co-funding regenerative agriculture

With LENs, organisations can co-fund regenerative agriculture to mitigate environmental risks with outcomes they can report. Co-funding reduces costs and maximises outcomes.

Funder benefits

Scope 3 & carbon removals

Through LENs, organisations can progress towards their Net Zero goals, as we provide primary carbon data on both scope 3 carbon reduction and carbon removals in value chains. Reporting is aligned with international carbon accounting standards.

We produce custom impact reports for each funding organisation, ensuring they have ready-to-report metrics. This is made possible by our ground-breaking Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) allocation protocol.

Biodiversity & nature goals

By providing detailed reporting on biodiversity, water and soil health metrics, LENs enables some of​ the most advanced reporting towards corporate and public-sector sustainability goals in the market. This also provides accelerated learning with real-world insights on which on-farm practices generate the most impact.

Landscape-scale impact

Delivering outcomes across: carbon reduction & removals, water quality, biodiversity, flood risk mitigation and supply security.

Reporting

Robust Measurement, Reporting and Verification aligned with credible standards including: SAI, GHG Protocol, and LSRG.

Value-chain resilience

Secure their operations by supporting the landscapes they depend on. The types of risks we help mitigate include: sourcing risks by improving yields for crops of interest; costs of operating in a landscape; the likelihood of floods or droughts.

Reduced costs, maximised outcomes

LENs implements regenerative agriculture programmes for funders, which means lower management time and costs compared to them doing this alone. This is particularly helpful for businesses with complex value chains, who typically don’t have direct access to farmers. By bringing together organisations across the rotation, funders can maximise outcomes and claims using fewer resources. In 2024, for example, LENs brought together eight organisations in the East of England, including food, beverage, water companies and the local council. This meant that 51% of measures were co-funded (up from 29% in 2023).

Why does co-funding matter?

The more co-funding farms receive, the more environmental benefits will be accrued, which is good for farmers, funders and the landscape. Co-funding provides a genuine value for money proposition, as it means that multiple measures can be ‘stacked’ on the same farms or fields. This reduces the cost per hectare and generates greater impact with the same resources.

What funders say

LENs offers an efficient way to pay farmers to manage their land in ways that protect the water environment. We rely on these catchments for water that we put into supply. Working with others, we are able to select a broad range of measures that benefit soil, water and biodiversity that protects the environment.

Chris GerrardAnglian Water

From our perspective, LENs EoE offers an effective, multi buyer approach to improving ecosystem services across the wider landscape. By pooling funding, we are able to co-fund exciting new approaches to regenerative agriculture and other nature-based solutions to drive long term changes to land management practices. The monitoring, reporting and verification process captures the benefits and impacts of our funding on water, biodiversity, carbon and other natural capital and allows the catchment team to show our company and regulators, the positive impacts our funding is having across the wider landscape and how it contributes to us meeting our regulatory goals within the Water Industry National Environment Programme.

Danny CoffeyAffinity Water

We acknowledge the importance of doing what we can to support farmers to transition towards regenerative agriculture. We work with LENs to mitigate our impact on the environment and build more resilience to our sourcing, helping to create a more regenerative food system. We work closely and collaboratively with the LENs team to achieve success.

Cécile DoinelHead of Regenerative Agriculture Purina Europe, a LENs Strategic Partner

LENs has developed over the last few years in partnership with a wide range of expert partners to become a robust model to unlock the efficient scaling of regenerative agriculture and landscape transformation. I hope this openness and transparency will ensure it continues to evolve, to increase impact, efficiency and scaling potential.

Andy GriffithsGlobal Head of Transformational Partnerships, Diageo

Frequently asked questions

LENs funds a range of regenerative agriculture practices. The most popular in 2024 were: reduced/no tillage, to minimise soil disturbance; reduced use of synthetic inputs, including fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides; planting and managing hedgerows; and keeping soils covered/living roots in the soil.

It also funds innovations – practices that are not pre-defined, such as trials relevant to a farm business or capital and in-field investments. Last year, these included direct drills, low disturbance subsoilers and yield monitoring on combine.

Our model is designed to pay farmers for specific interventions and practices rather than purely for end results. This approach ensures that the burden of delivery does not rest solely on farmers and that risk is shared between all parties. In 2025, we expanded our offering to introduce performance-based payments based on achieving the two higher levels of our Regen Pathway. Performance is determined by the number and extent of regenerative farming principles adopted on farm. We offer payment by practice for those starting out, and payment for performance for those further along in their Regen journey. This allows us to reward farmers for their holistic adoption of principles and meet them where they are at.

LENs Regen Ag Pathway

We introduced the LENs Regen Pathway before the SAI Platform launched its framework, and have ensured it not only aligns but exceeds the minimum thresholds.

No. LENs is not a carbon or nature credit system. We don’t report tradable outcome units or sell the outcomes from implemented practices as credits. Under carbon credit schemes, funding parties cannot mutually benefit from each other’s investments on the same farms (outcomes cannot be co-claimed).

  • Soil Carbon Stocks
  • Soil bulk density
  • % Arable crop land managed with minimum tillage
  • Nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) per tonne of crop
  • Area of semi-natural vegetation coverage and natural habitat area as a proportion of total farm area
  • Reduction in total pesticide use
  • Key species indicator (species count)
  • Emissions reductions
  • Above and soil carbon sequestration
  • Farm business profile (farm size, ownership, gender)
  • Practice adoption by farm businesses
  • LENs measures and hectares

To maintain integrity, LENs aligns with relevant existing and emerging standards. These standards provide rules and requirements around how outcomes are accounted for and reported. 

These frameworks include the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Land Sector and Removals Guidance (LSRG) and the Science Based Targets initiative’s (SBTi) Forest Land and Agriculture Guidance (FLAG). LSRG and FLAG are particularly relevant for informing how LENs measures carbon reductions and removals and how these outcomes are then allocated to various demand-side parties.

The LENs MRV Protocol is reviewed on an annual basis to account for evolutions and new frameworks and standards.

Get in touch

If you’re not already in touch with our supply aggregators and want to find out more about LENs, please email the team at lens@the-lens.co or use the contact form here.

Find out more about LENs

Our Partners

Meet our Central Team, who are developing LENs in partnership with a range of organisations in the UK and Europe.
LENs at Groundswell
LENs Impact Report reveals proven outcomes from landscape regeneration
How LENs is driving collaboration for resilience and impact.

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