To empower collective ambitions and accelerate the maturation of regenerative agriculture finance markets – the financial sector needs examples of financing structures that contribute to regenerative transitions at scale. In July 2024, Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS) partnered with Metabolic, a system change agency focused on transitioning the economy to a fundamentally sustainable state, to co-convene a week-long session at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, to build systemic initiatives and financial innovations to unlock scale in regenerative agriculture. This convening provided the opportunity to practically utilize and build upon key financial structures laid out in the recent widely read report, Financing for Regenerative Agriculture, co-authored by TIFS, Pollination, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

This co-convening included a diverse group of investors, companies, and farmers from Brazil, East Africa, India, and the US Midwest to identify replicable initiatives and develop scalable financing structures. Attendees engaged in a mix of collaborative sessions aimed at prototyping next-generation investment structures to drive outcomes across biodiversity, water, greenhouse gas emissions, farmer well-being, yield, and other critical areas. Together we aimed to achieve several key outcomes and goals, including:

• Amplifying Successes: Creating exemplar lighthouses, successful landscape approaches that illuminate the feasibility and benefits of a regenerative transition within a place-based model. 
• Deepening Trust and Reducing Risk: Fostering confidence and deeper partnerships to facilitate the development of concrete capital mobilization strategies, including reducing individual risk and enabling collective progress.
• Diverse Perspectives for Shared Learning: Convening unconventional yet critical allies, including C-suite leaders, model farmers, and world-class investors from across different geographies to share learning and build inspiration for what can be achieved.

Generative Collaboration 

TIFS’ goal is to turn the investment structures created during this convening into replicable models for scaling proof-of-concept commercial models, integrating and developing markets, and creating pathways for large institutional capital to enter the regenerative agriculture finance market. By bringing actors together around a shared geography with shared challenges, we believe that the development of lighthouses is a critical way to unlock capital in a targeted manner at a specific landscape level.

Four Lighthouses Seeded at Bellagio:

U.S. Midwest: The U.S. Midwest lighthouse initiative U.S. is a developing landscape approach in the Red River watershed (Upper Mississippi watershed) and U.S. Upper Midwest to better deploy existing resources, organize markets, invest in infrastructure, and engage off-takers for long-term secure markets for regenerative ingredients. This initiative will bring cohesion across collective efforts that exist in silos but can be maximized to enhance achievable impacts on the ground, and make the case for existing and new investable opportunities that accelerate self-sustaining regenerative transitions.

Brazil: The Amana Fund is a bio-economy debt facility focused on financing sustainable agroforestry-based palm oil production and the market development of non-timber forest products in the Brazilian Amazon. It aims to restore degraded lands, promote regenerative agriculture, and deliver socio-economic benefits to local communities.

India: The India lighthouse initiative is a transition finance mechanism to bring Andhra Pradesh’s Community Managed Natural Farming to financial sustainability at the national level and foster a scalable model driven by local farmer empowerment, supported through key state and national banks and government partnerships. In addition, the lighthouse aims to increase dedicated infrastructure to improve access to diverse markets. 

Kenya: The Kenya Agroforestry Lighthouse Program (KALP) is an initiative that facilitates coordination between public, private, philanthropic, and off-taker investments. Using a technology-enabled platform, it aims to transition East African coffee farmers from monoculture to diversified agroforestry systems. 

Seeding Futures Together 

TIFS, Metabolic and The Rockefeller Foundation continue to work together to deepen the lighthouses formed at Bellagio while also seeding new lighthouses to apply these methods to more initiatives and landscapes. 

At Climate Week NYC gathered again as a collective group to host “Financing Frontiers in Food: Scaling Finance for Regenerative Food Systems Transitions; Co-creating initiatives to scale deep regenerative agriculture” with the Thread Fund, and How Good at Regen House.  This event provided a space for private, public, and philanthropic investors, companies, governments and farmer-led initiatives to build real partnerships in shared geographies and with a common ambition to accelerate the transition to regenerative production. 

The primary objectives of the event were to: 

• Inspire participants to create financing structures for regenerative food systems transitions in specific places focused on particular crops and farmer groups.
• Utilize a framework co-designed by our team to identify distinct opportunities for coordinated market development and capital structuring in specific geographies. 
• Forge interactions between unconventional yet critical allies to encourage learning and share inspiration for what can be achieved by aligning interests across sectors in areas of shared interest.

We look forward to ongoing opportunities to scale this critical work. Do you have an idea or initiative that you’re working on that you would like to share with our team? Please fill out this form to get in touch and be added to our newsletter list.