Patagonia Japan has partnered with Niida Honke, a 300-year-old sake brewery in Fukushima, to release Yamamori 2025, the first sake in Japan to earn Regenerative Organic Certification.
The collaboration centers on rice cultivation that actively rebuilds ecosystems rather than harming or merely sustaining them. Niida Honke manages its rice paddies without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, maintains the surrounding forests that feed the paddies' water sources, and crafts wooden barrels from cedar trees it plants and harvests on its own land.
The sake, offered for sale through Patagonia's Provisions line, was made entirely from the brewery's own Omachi rice. And its release follows the third annual Regenerative Organic Conference Patagonia has organized in Japan, focused this year on paddy rice systems. While international discussions around regenerative agriculture are largely centered on dryland farming, Patagonia Japan collaborated with the Regenerative Organic Alliance to develop guidelines specifically for wet rice cultivation — a system that feeds around 3.5 billion people and accounts for 10 to 17% of global methane emissions.
The framework addresses the unique ecological characteristics of paddy fields, including their role in supporting biodiversity through amphibians, migratory birds and aquatic species. Niida Honke's approach exemplifies this systems thinking: the brewery creates what researchers call a "habitat mosaic" by planting different rice varieties at different times, expanding the temporal and spatial niches available to wildlife throughout the growing season.
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Yamamori 2025 signals how established brands might approach climate action in 2025. Not through carbon offset programs or efficiency tweaks, but by backing agricultural systems that measurably regenerate ecosystems. The sake functions as both product and proof point, demonstrating that traditional knowledge and rigorous environmental standards can coexist profitably.
By coupling the product launch with infrastructure-building work — developing certification frameworks, organizing industry conferences, funding ecological research — Patagonia is treating regenerative agriculture as a category to be built rather than a marketing narrative to be borrowed. For brands questioning whether sustainability initiatives can move beyond incremental improvements, this offers a template: find producers already doing complex ecological work, help them meet credible standards, then use your distribution power to make their approach economically viable enough that others will follow.