What regenerative means for leather 

Talk to farmers doing this work and the conversation is rarely about leather at all. It's about soil health, pasture management, biodiversity, water cycles, and how cattle fit into a landscape rather than sit on top of it. Leather only enters the picture once you ask where the hide came from and whether that land was regenerating or degrading.

But what does it actually mean for that land to be regenerating? Practices like rotational grazing or agroforestry are part of the picture, but so is understanding whether those changes are actually leading to better outcomes for soil, biodiversity, carbon and water over time.

Animal welfare sits inside that same frame, not alongside it. The useful welfare question isn't just what harm is being avoided, it's what positive outcomes exist: more time on pasture, more natural behaviour, less reliance on intensive feedlot-style systems. In a genuinely regenerative system, good land management and animal welfare should go hand in hand, but welfare still has to be built in and measured deliberately, not assumed.

The building blocks exist, but the market is still early

So what does the landscape actually look like today? There are already standards and initiatives addressing different parts of the picture. The Leather Working Group, the industry's main environmental audit standard, assesses tanneries. A separate initiative, the Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather, co-led by Textile Exchange, the Leather Working Group, and WWF, asks brands to commit to sourcing deforestation and conversion-free leather by 2030, including sending clear market signals to slaughterhouses and investing in farm-level change. That's genuinely useful groundwork, and it points in the direction we think matters, towards the farm. Deforestation-free and regenerative are related but not quite the same ambition. One is focused on avoiding harm, the other on actively improving land over time. That upstream, actively regenerative layer is where we're looking, and the most useful framework here is Textile Exchange's Regenerative Agriculture Outcome Framework, which helps the industry move away from just avoiding negative outcomes and towards measuring positive ones.

It's also worth sizing up how small this corner of the leather industry still is. Textile Exchange's 2025 Materials Market Report puts global raw hide production at 13.8 million tonnes in 2024, drawn from an estimated 1.6 billion animals, with cattle hides alone accounting for roughly two-thirds of that volume. Against a market that size, the report notes that most existing leather standards operate at the processing stage, and that only a handful of small supply chains currently manage to maintain traceability of certified animals all the way through to finished leather. The regenerative-specific programmes that do exist for leather are still tiny relative to this scale. Textile Exchange points to A Greener World's Certified Regenerative by AGW label, BEHUMANE's fully traceable regenerative and animal welfare verified supply chain, and Land to Market's outcomes-based regenerative sourcing certification, all of which are active but for which, as the report itself states, production volume data isn't yet available. That absence of volume data is telling in itself: these programmes are operating, but not yet at a scale anyone can measure.

That said, a handful of larger brands are already showing what's possible in this space. Timberland, part of VF Corporation, has run a regenerative leather programme with the Savory Institute since 2020, sourcing from US cattle ranches with tanneries audited against the Leather Working Group standard. VF has reported using around 78 metric tonnes of regenerative leather through Timberland in its most recent reporting year. It's a useful data point: the volumes are still small relative to VF's overall sourcing, but they show that a large brand can build a traceable regenerative leather supply chain all the way from farm to finished product. 

Two approaches to building regenerative leather

When we at Milkywire started to look across the projects working in this space, we realised that support tends to fall into two broad categories.

The first is backing farmers or farmer groups who have already made the transition, or are well underway, and giving them recognition and market access for work they're already doing. The advantage here is speed and lower risk. You're supporting proof points, helping existing regenerative systems scale, and demonstrating viability, with a bigger emphasis on market and supply chain infrastructure, storage, processing, regenerative tagging, even in-house tanning, rather than on supporting the initial transition at farm level. The tradeoff is additionality. If a farm was already regenerative before your support showed up, then how much of the land impact can really be attributed to that support?

The second is supporting the slower work of transition, with farmers and land managers moving from conventional practices towards regenerative ones, including convincing them to do so. This is where additionality is much clearer because you're supporting a transition that might not otherwise happen. But it's slower, riskier, and the timeline to a traceable regenerative hide, let alone an established route from farm to tannery to brand, stretches out. You're also often building infrastructure (storage, logistics, tannery and abattoir relationships) at the same time as you're building trust and upskilling farmers, rather than plugging into something that already exists.

For brands, these approaches offer different ways to contribute. Supporting existing regenerative systems can help build the infrastructure, market access and demand needed for them to scale. Supporting farmers through transition can provide the early funding and incentive needed to change practices on the ground, particularly when farmers can't afford to take on the costs and risks of transition alone. But it can take longer before that work translates into a traceable material a brand can actually source. A project can be strong on land management and weaker on market access, or vice versa. Neither approach is inherently better, and ultimately regenerative leather will need both if it is going to move beyond individual projects and become a functioning market.

Do we need a new certification for regenerative leather?

One of the interesting things about leather is that some of the building blocks for verification may already exist. Because leather is a byproduct, farm-level practices may already be assessed through existing certifications, including those focused on pasture management, even if those certifications weren't designed with leather in mind.

However, these existing certifications don't necessarily cover all the elements we would want to see in a regenerative system. Some focus more heavily on practices like grazing management, while others place greater emphasis on measuring outcomes such as soil health and biodiversity. One practical model could therefore be a layered one, with existing certifications as a base and additional practice or outcome-based criteria added where needed to close the gaps specific to regenerative leather. The opportunity is to connect that existing verification to the leather supply chain, not necessarily to build a parallel one.

There's already at least one attempt at this kind of convergence. The GRASS specification allows a range of existing certifications for regenerative livestock to map to a common standard and is specifically designed to include byproducts such as hides. It's still early, but it's a useful example of how the industry could build on verification that's already in place rather than creating an entirely parallel system for leather.

Our first bet, and why we made it upstream

We at Milkywire ran a call for proposals across Europe to support our first regenerative leather project, in partnership with TOTEME. We found a genuinely interesting mix of approaches: some focused on recognising and supporting farmers who'd already transitioned, others on backing the harder work of transition from a standing start. We also looked closely at how projects approached animal welfare, land management, impact measurement and the eventual pathway from farm to finished leather.

Across the proposals we reviewed, promised hide volumes ranged from a handful of test hides in a pilot year up to around a thousand hides annually at the more established end. Even the higher end of that range is a rounding error against an industry that produces close to 10 million tonnes of cattle hides a year. It just reiterates the point I made earlier about how early this work still is. These are proof of concept numbers, not supply chain numbers.

We ultimately chose to support a project that starts upstream, working directly with farms transitioning into regenerative practices. For this first project, we wanted to focus our support on helping drive that transition on the ground. The selected project, led by Reforest'Action, will support dairy farms in Normandy, France in their transition towards regenerative agriculture through silvopasture and rotational grazing. It also includes collecting carbon and biodiversity data to track impact over time, alongside early-stage engagement with a local slaughterhouse to explore future supply chain connections.

It also means we're going in with our eyes open about what's still unresolved. Hide availability isn't guaranteed on day one, and neither is a clean line from farm to tannery to brand. Those connections have to be built as the project runs. We're early. We know that. But we'd rather be honest about where the model is genuinely tested and where it isn't, and contribute what we learn to the wider industry. 

If you're a brand deciding where to start on regenerative leather, this is the moment that conversation matters most, while the model is still being shaped rather than settled. Let's have that conversation.