The Case for Funding Regenerative Agriculture as a Climate Solution
/
no-till soybean farming in argentina. Helga_foto/shutterstock
Conversations about how to confront climate change often turn to technology—solar panels, smart buildings, electric cars or more contentious efforts like climate engineering or carbon dioxide removal.
Many technological steps, or leaps, forward are undoubtedly needed to transition to a carbon-neutral world. But that focus can obscure the immense potential that lies not in new discoveries, but in reconsidering old practices. That is particularly true in agriculture.
A new report, “Barriers for Farmers & Ranchers to Adopt Regenerative Ag Practices in the U.S.,” seeks to make that case to funders. Offering a detailed overview of the regenerative agriculture field, it argues that philanthropic support for traditional, even ancient, practices can help not only address the climate threat, but also catalyze a transition in our agricultural system to better support farmers, health and the natural world. While still a small niche within philanthropy, regenerative agriculture has been drawing increasing attention from funders, according to the report’s author and others in the field.
“Oftentimes from the funding space, we’re constantly seeking these new, crazy innovations and silver bullets to solve our problems,” said Jennifer O’Connor, philanthropy consultant and author of the report, which was funded by Patagonia. “These solutions exist on the landscape and amongst the people on the land that have been doing this for decades. We know what needs to happen. It’s just a matter of will.”
How humans alter and make use of land is crucial in addressing climate change. Fourteen of the top 25 solutions on Project Drawdown’s list of strategies for climate change mitigation are based on food, agriculture, land use and carbon sinks. One of the more arresting statistics cited in the report notes that “100 years ago, our farms produced 14 calories of food for every 1 calorie of fossil fuels used to grow the food; now it is almost reversed—about 10 calories of fossil fuels used for every 1 calorie of food we produce.”
The report, which is subtitled “A Roadmap for Funders and Stakeholders,” urges philanthropy to pay particular attention to the barriers facing women in farming, as well as Black farmers and food producers, and other people of color in the industry, who have often been shut out of traditional avenues of support. It also underscores the debt that regenerative agriculture owes to Native communities.
“It’s important to recognize that these are not new solutions that white people have discovered. These are solutions that are rooted in very deep Indigenous wisdom in understanding our land,” O’Connor said. “We can marry those understandings with new technologies and science, but we have to also marry it with the insights of BIPOC farmers.”
“A pretty small subset of funders”
Up until three years ago, regenerative agriculture funders were a “a pretty small subset” of an already limited group of food and ag grantmakers. But in the last few years, the field has seen “constant growth and exponential momentum,” O’Connor said. “For a lot of reasons, it’s really taken off.”
Public health funders, once more narrowly focused on pesticide exposure via food and other sources, are looking at agricultural systems more broadly. Energy funders aiming to reduce fossil fuel use are starting to look at agricultural methods as a major driver. Animal health funders are increasingly interested in frameworks that support the health of people, animals and places.
Climate change has been another driver of new funding. Even some major funders, like ClimateWorks Foundation, are exploring regenerative agriculture as a strategy. And most recently, COVID-19 has led many, including funders, to reexamine systems like food supply chains, where weaknesses were laid bare by the pandemic.
Growing equity and justice concerns among climate funders—particularly the impacts of climate change on Indigenous people around the globe, whose age-old practices form the foundation of regenerative agriculture—have pushed more grantmakers to consider the field.
“You can come in on a lot of problems and still get to the same answer,” said Urvashi Rangan, chief science advisor for the Grace Communications Foundation, and one of the sources O’Connor spoke to for the report.
Funders in this space tend to be small, family institutions with an environmentally focused and generally progressive orientation. But the outliers the report mentions are notable, such as the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and the massive Walton Family Foundation.
As previously reported in Inside Philanthropy, the three-year-old Regenerative Agriculture Foundation has been one channel for the burgeoning philanthropic interest in the field. While the San Rafael, California-based nonprofit lacks an endowment, it serves as a conduit for a variety of funders, including the Cedar Tree Foundation, Armonia LLC, The 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation.
Funders for Regenerative Agriculture, a grantmaker network launched in 2019, is another bellwether for this growing interest. In the last year, the group’s membership has doubled. “Every week we hear from three or four new funders, investors,” said Rangan, who is the co-chair of the group’s steering committee.
That said, it remains a small field. “Even with the growth and momentum of funders interested in this space, it’s still very nascent,” O’Connor acknowledged. She estimated that total funding in the space only recently eclipsed $1 million to $2 million annually.
“All the different pathways funders can take”
Over the past year-plus—before the outbreak of COVID-19—O’Connor criss-crossed the country to speak to farmers, livestock producers and others in regenerative agriculture. She held more than 280 interviews, including many roundtable discussions with large groups. Listed over three pages at the opening of the report, the interviewees run the gamut from major philanthropies and brands to small operators.
“Many of the farmers that I spoke with were like, ‘No one has ever come out here and asked me what the problems are and what I think,’” said O’Connor, who is the founder of consulting group Guidelight Strategies. “Often in philanthropy, we’re making decisions in an office far away, but these are people on the landscape.”
Those conversations form the bulk of the 192-page report, each section packed with short profiles of organizations, businesses and networks from all over the United States that are involved in regenerative agriculture and related projects in their communities.
The report provides an overview of the field through a framework of eight overarching categories: behavior and cultural change, land access, trusted technical assistance, financial capital and incentives, regenerative supply chains, strategic communications, research and science, and policy reform. The scope underlines the diversity of the field.
“There are just so many tendrils of this, it’s hard to see the whole picture at once, but that’s what we’re trying to help people navigate,” Rangan said. “It shows all the different pathways funders can take. It’s not just a one-size-fits-all.”
To date, many of the grantmakers that make their way into the small world of regenerative agriculture are focused on their own narrower niche. O’Connor commends this work, which ranges from improving soil health to addressing urban food deserts to providing technical assistance to farmers and ranchers. But her goal is to drive a more systemic-level approach.
“We’ve seen funders focused on very siloed issues,” O’Connor said. “What we need if we’re actually going to tackle the industrial ag system—we need a lot of coordinated strategic action. It’s going to require a lot of capital and a lot of coordinated capital.”
O’Connor highlights capital as a particularly promising area for philanthropy to catalyze. “The finance that’s currently available on the agriculture side keeps producers in an extractive system,” she said. Current options put all the risk on the farmer; subsidies focus on corn and soy, and the loans are all relatively short-term, typically 12 to 13 months. She would like to see philanthropy work with investors and financial service providers to set up financial structures that could offer blended capital—i.e., a mixture of grants, loans, investments and other finance options—to farmers and livestock producers.
In this respect and others, the report’s vision extends beyond philanthropy. Funding can help draw in new players and advance the field, as advocated in another recent report O’Connor co-authored about how funders can support transformation in the fiber supply chain. There are already promising signs of the breadth of interest. The report notes several major brands already support regenerative agricultural projects, including Danone, General Mills and Patagonia.
Why Patagonia turned to regenerative agriculture
The tale of how Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company known for its activism, came to fund this report starts back in 1985. That year, the company pledged to give 1% of its sales each year to environmental causes. Since then, Patagonia has awarded more than $110 million to organizations around the world.
It gives out those dollars through a “rather sprawling” grant program, said Sarah Ebe, an environmental grants program officer with Patagonia. The Ventura, California-based company only grants in countries where it has offices and retail stores, though that still gives it lots of options. Patagonia has stores in the U.S., Canada, Chile, Argentina, Australia, Japan, South Korea and most of Europe.
Most funds flow from programs at either the retail stores or the corporate offices. Practices vary by country, but in the U.S., each store receives a grants budget. Led by one point person, staff choose which local groups will receive funding. At the corporate level, giving is split between an application-based program in which small groups of staff select recipients and a strategic program. Grants go to national or regional efforts. Each program focuses on five interconnected areas: land, water, regenerative agriculture, equity and inclusion, and climate. “There’s always constant overlap,” Ebe said. At all levels, most grants are small, between $8,000 and $20,000.
Through these programs, Patagonia funds a broad range of grassroots work, including efforts opposing some of the most contentious elements of industrial agriculture: GMOs, pesticide use and high-density livestock operations that use small pens and packed cages.
But over the past decade, as the company thought about how to take a more proactive approach, regenerative agriculture drew interest from many in the company, including founder Yvon Chouinard. His 2012 launch of a related food company, Patagonia Provisions, advanced this interest, as did Patagonia’s efforts to look more closely at the textiles it uses.
“It really forced us to take a hard look at the growing practices that are taking place in our supply chain,” Ebe said. “It was definitely this shift in thinking from not only, how do we stop these extractive practices, but contribute to change.”
So in late 2016, the company launched a funding program to support regenerative agriculture. Funding has grown nearly 10-fold since then, said Ebe. The effort took another big step when the company decided in 2018 to donate the full $10 million it received from the GOP’s tax cut. The team earmarked $1 million for regenerative agriculture efforts, including funding this report to guide that work.
“We really wanted to do a gut check of what is happening in the field,” said Ebe. “Who’s funding in this space, where are there funding gaps, where could our dollars be most useful… what are the levers that we can pull, both this year with this tax funding, and in future years.”
What the coming years might hold
Philanthropy is always weighing where its funds can have the greatest impact. Given the still tiny funding community for regenerative agriculture, that question seems to loom particularly large in this space. In conversations before the election, both Rangan and O’Connor highlighted policy as a particularly promising lever.
One focus, as always in the agricultural space, is the U.S. farm bill, which comes up for renewal in the next few years. The bill, which totaled $867 billion in its 2018 incarnation, governs everything from subsidies and conservation programs to food support and nutrition policy. “So much of the agricultural problems are tied up in our farm bill,” O’Connor said.
“There are some really big opportunities around the farm bill and other pieces of legislation that could really be incentivizing regenerative practices—and disincentivizing degenerative practices,” added Rangan. President-elect Joe Biden’s victory opens that range of possibilities a lot wider than it was before last Tuesday, even as the fate of the Senate remains unknown.
But despite the shift in opportunity at the federal level, national politics is not the only focus. O’Connor would like to see more funding to educate state legislatures and local officials on these issues, as well as support for grassroots power building.
The new report aims to offer funders an overview of a complex and interconnected landscape. It wants to bring in new funding by demystifying the space for potential newcomers. But more broadly, it wants to encourage grantmakers and others to see the many elements of regenerative agriculture in a larger context.
“I think it’s critical that people see this as a system,” O’Connor said. “It’s more about getting people to ask the question: How was my food produced, who produced it and who wins and loses in that production? That’s a hard set of questions.”
