Collaborating on the Regenerative Agriculture Future
Colin Custer ’24 describes how he partnered with Alex Healey ’23 to research a new finance model for the growing regenerative agriculture industry. The report they co-authored is already making an impact.
“Wait, you can make this a career?” The thought flashed across my mind early in my first year at Yale SOM, while I was chatting with Alex Healey SOM/YSE ’23, a second-year student and part-time associate at a sustainable ag private equity firm. I had just moved back to the United States after five years in East Africa working for an agricultural nonprofit. There, I had seen the power of regenerative agriculture first-hand but it always felt like the purview of nonprofits, or of farmers themselves. Yet here I was hearing about a burgeoning industry bringing billions of dollars to bear scaling regenerative agriculture. I wanted in!
Consequently Alex and I, with some early help from Ryan Smith YSE ’23 and Harrison Meyer SOM/YSE ’24, partnered with the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) to write a report about how to accelerate this new industry’s growth. Initially we believed we needed to come up with new metrics or incentives that could drive more money into the regenerative ag world. Yet early conversations with investors like Dominick Grant SOM/YSE ’12 and Jessamine Fitzpatrick SOM/YSE ’12 made us change tack. Plenty of investors saw the importance of funding a regenerative agriculture transition. But the traditional tools of finance simply didn’t work for regenerative farmers. Investor expectations, inflexible structures, and the very real culture barriers between financiers and farmers were getting in the way. We pivoted from studying how to attract funding to how to deploy that funding in an equitable, profitable, and efficacious way.
This pivot turned this research project into one of the best parts of my Yale experience. With the support from CBEY, Alex and I spent our time interviewing dozens of farmers, investors, and institutional food buyers about what can make the regenerative revolution work. We got to hear directly from experts in the space, learn from the successes and failures of others, and see firsthand the innovation of top organizations in the industry. But best of all, we could elevate the voices of farmers who are on the front lines of this transition. The report, Bridging the Regenerative Agriculture Financing Gap, was our attempt to resolve many of their frustrations with well-meaning investors, how to reshape the financing landscape, and how to create win-win-win situations for the environment, financiers, and farming communities.
We had no expectations for our report, so the overwhelming and positive reaction to the publication has been a pleasant surprise. We’ve clearly struck a chord with many of those in the regenerative movement who realize it’s time for new models of finance to support farmers, but don’t know how to build them. Our hope is that through this report, we can connect some of the organizations already doing great work in the field with those hoping to find new partners, and to shape the conversations that investors eventually have with the farmers on the ground, forging the new ways of growing our food.
We’ve already started to see movement just a few weeks after publication: New projects out of CBEY’s Regenerative Agriculture Lab are coming into focus, investors have reached out to learn more about how our principles are applied, and a similar study has just been commissioned in the UK through the British Development Bank and the Green Finance Institute. As these conversations continue and new models of finance and farming are born, I am optimistic we will witness a transformation in the way food is produced; I’m grateful to have contributed to that transformation.
