Conservation Finance Network

Last month, Iroquois Valley Farmland began offering shares in the firm's 12-year-old real estate investment trust to investors with as little as $10,000, via a direct public offering. Previously, only wealthy individuals, foundations and family offices – so-called accredited investors – were eligible to invest.

States that embrace innovative new ways to finance on-farm conservation can deliver multiple benefits to farmers, state residents, taxpayers and the environment, according to a new report released at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Annual Meeting by NASDA and Environmental Defense Fund.

The public and private sectors can incentivize sustainable land use and forest conservation. While still only one part of the solution, there are encouraging signs of new efforts to finance sustainable agribusiness.

The initiative includes a facility to offer green bonds to help finance low-interest credit lines to Brazilian farmers.

“Investors speak the language of risk,” says Delta Institute’s David LeZaks, a lead author of the report. “When you start to manage systems for increasing soil health and having bigger stocks of carbon in the soil, those systems are inherently less risky and more resilient to extreme weather and climate change.”

As we know, farming is a business of extremely lean margins, which means it can be difficult for farmers and ranchers to come up with the funds necessary to transition [to regenerative agriculture]. As a result, innovative new offerings are popping up, creating a business model to provide ranchers and farmers with additional incentives to switch.

The Responsible Commodities Facility, unveiled at the London Stock Exchange, plans to provide low-interest credit lines to Brazilian soy and corn farmers who commit to using degraded pasture and avoid clearing forests and native grassland for agriculture. For farmers, the initiative will offer an important complement to official credit lines.

It is more important than ever to provide farmers with practical guidance on how to minimize the costs and risks of conservation adoption. Fortunately, a new technical bulletin from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture does just that.

As the investment community in the United States, particularly within the fields of sustainable, responsible, and impact investing, shows an increasing appetite for investing in sustainable agriculture and food systems across asset classes, a subset of investors is demonstrating growing interest in financing not simply “sustainable” agriculture but agriculture that is deemed explicitly “regenerative.”

In just one week, farmers have pledged more than 700,000 acres to Indigo Ag’s new carbon sequestration initiative. The program, which launched on June 12, will pay farmers to use regenerative farming practices and remove carbon from the atmosphere.