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Last week, I attended the Regenerative Food System Investment Forum in Denver. I'm grateful to any of you I met who are reading this. For those who didn’t attend this year, you should try next year—or virtually in December, focusing on Canada or Europe in February 2025.

Understanding the capital landscape is crucial if you care about regenerative agriculture and transforming our food systems. A flood of money wants to be allocated to regeneration, and there are many financial levers to affect change.

What’s the Current Regenerative Food System Investment Landscape?

Regenerative agriculture has moved from “Proof of Concept” → “Proof of Scaling.”

The market is mainly innovator-led, but the movement has crossed the chasm into early adopters eager to scale regenerative across the entire food system.

The chasm regarding capital doesn’t seem to have entirely been crossed, and finding ways to access institutional investors will be crucial to transitioning our food system.

Capital is critical to scaling those solutions. Estimates say we need $200-$450 billion to scale regenerative agriculture. Currently, it is around $20-45 billion and growing.

Reflections from the Event

How Can Regenerative Scale Its Impact?

Emma Fuller from Fractal Ag opened the discussion with a question.

“How do we scale solutions for resilient farming and soil health?”

There are 255 million row crop acres in the US, 176 million of which are corn and soy. If we are serious about regenerative agriculture, then how do we engage those acres?

One way is by freeing up farmers' equity to purchase more acres when they become available so they can grow their land base.

This is how Fractal works.

Fractal takes a minority stake in land farmers own

• Fractal benefits from land appreciation or depreciation

• Charges flexible annual premiums

• Allows institutional money to gain exposure to farmland

• Invests over a 10-year term, giving the farmer time to pay back

Farmers remain in control of their land

• Farmers stay on the title & maintain ownership

• Farmers decide how best to farm that land

• Farmers buy out Fractal at any point after two years or roll over after ten years

Regenerating the “Corn Belt” comes with many challenges, capital being only one. But everyone agrees that something needs to change across these 176 million acres that oscillate between corn and soy year after year.

Capital Must Be Collaborative & Contextual

The first principle of soil health is understanding your context.

The same applies to capital and financial products. There is bad capital and good capital. Sometimes, one solution works, but most often, many are needed.

Funding the regenerative transition of our food and farming systems will require multiple types of capital and combining and stacking those products and services—especially when funding the missing middle of our food and farming systems.

MAD Agriculture Collaborative Acquisition

MAD Markets recently acquired Timeless Seeds with the help of many funders to begin addressing the “missing middle.”

Timeless Seeds is a Montana-based company started by four farmers to get organic lentils, grains, and other crops processed and distributed into the market. MAD Markets hopes to strengthen its work connecting farms, brands, processors, distributors, retailers, and institutional sourcing partners.

They aspire to repeat the same strategy across other grain mills and processors nationwide to develop markets for farmers and sourcing to brands and buyers.

Case Study for Collaborative Funding

From the Forbes article covering the news…

“The funding for this deal is coming from a variety of supporters — all fixated on impact and regenerative agriculture. Firms include Terra Regenerative Capital, a public benefit investment company, and Builders Vision, an impact platform, which is anchoring the investment in Timeless Seeds. Together with Blueberry Capital and twenty-four other mission-aligned investors, Mad Markets plans to launch an acquisition strategy for infrastructure across the country, starting with this purchase.”

Educating Farmers About Accessing Capital

12 Financial Levers of Soil Health

Patrick Smith from Soil Upside aggregated the "12 Financial Levers of Soil Health" to clarify the regenerative capital landscape for farmers and funders.

As mentioned earlier, context matters with capital. Every project and farmer is unique, existing within a network of variables. Not every financial product or service will serve every circumstance, but understanding where leverage is in the system can better facilitate transformation on the farm, in the soil, and throughout the food system.

Entrepreneurial Education for Farmers

One key point raised at the event was the importance of farmers educating themselves on investment literacy and sharpening their business know-how.

I met up with Dawnelise Regnery Rosen, the executive director at FARMpreneurs™.

FARMpreneurs™ is a week-long business sprint where farmers bring their “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” and develop a strategy, collaborate with peers, and learn from social entrepreneurs with decades of educational and operational experience.

And best of all, it’s free for farmers thanks to the generosity of Ideagarden Institute.

I have been working with her on their digital marketing strategy to help bring this program nationwide to equip more farmers with the entrepreneurial skills they need to become leaders in their local food system. Follow along on LinkedIn or Instagram.

The application deadline is October 28th if you are a farmer or rancher.

And again, it’s free - so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Your support is an investment in the professional development of farmers.

Like Jesse Smith from White Buffalo, who attended FARMpreneurs™ in 2020 with the hopes of developing a value-added product using regeneratively sourced foods.

And to know that Figure Ate Foods emerged from FARMpreneurs™ excites me to see what farmers at the upcoming strategic sprints will create!