I’ve compiled a list of some of the ideas for regen AgriBusinesses that I’ve somehow dug up, encountered or thought about.
- Please feel free to be inspired/steal/copypaste anything here.
- Maybe we could even do something together for common progress
Always feel free to reach out to me if you are building or want to support something along the lines of what is listed below. None of the notes below will ever be “final” or even half-way done, always work-in-progress.
My overall vision is to be part of building a “Precious Plastic” equivalent for Regenerative AgriBusinesses.
But what will that then look like concretely in the context of European Regen Ag?
There are many potential (progress-generating, accessibility-improving, envrionmentally and socioeconomically sound, scalable & profitable) paths to take. The ideas below represent bits and pieces of some approaches to take, or even places to start from.
Innovation is indeed sometimes saying no to 1000 exciting and good ideas.
Anyway, here we go…
1. Humus Sapien - Regen Cooperative
Regionally organised cooperatives that give regenerative (agroecological) farms access to economies of scale & Scope.
- An “Arla for Regen/Agroecological farming”? 🥸😇
If we do not organise together, we are never going to be able to make any kind of impact on the food system at large. Let’s learn from what the established industry has succeeded with and avoid the mistakes and less environmental/animal wellfare/socioeconomic friendly ways of doing business.
Probably starting with a specific type of collective purchasing (like chicken feed) and then working from there.
Functions of the cooperative, organising collective:
- Purchasing
- Access to wholesale cost prices for OPEX like feed etc. and even CAPEX like trees etc. where appropriate
- Making use of food waste streams to deliver feed for animals (e.g. old bread from supermarkets for chicken/pig feed)
- Getting over legal and scale hurdles for accessing these kinds of useful food waste streams
- Selling and logistics
- Giving farmers access to new and better markets that value the quality and values of their products
- Pick-up points
- List of partners
- Økoskabet? Logistic companies?
- Climate Farmers?
- Co-investing in logistic equipment and vehicles
- Processing Facilities
- Making use of ALL outputs from the farm (nose to tail, stalk to leaf)
- Turning raw goods into Value Added Products (NO Ultra Processed Foods though)
- Making use of gut-friendly fermentation techniques where appropriate
- Financial Clarity - advisory
- Some Finance guy/gal called “Jørgen” they know they can always call
- Access to benchmarking
- Skill training sessions?
- Business Development Community
- Knowledge sharing & “Templatisation”
- Finding the right AgriBusiness partners
- List of specialised regen consultants for specific agronomic/land management problems
- Training sessions?
Being a cooperative means that every time a farmer who is a member of the cooperative, buys something via the cooperative, whether inputs or advisory services, they essentially put money back into their own business.
- Farmers can choose to participate in the cooperative commercial activities they want to
- Farmers get a share of the profits generated from that paid out on a yearly/quarterly basis
- Farmers get a seat at the table, co-deciding the direction of the cooperative
BUT there needs to be a highly professional and dedicated management team. Otherwise I believe we’ll risk that noone really takes ownership for decisions and pushes things forward.
2. Regen Finance tool
Essentially turning what I do as a farm finance consultant today with templates but also relatively manual processes into some kind of digital service/product. Especially automating the onboarding of new clients with linking up to bank API, accounting software and record keeping structure and making a user-friendly interface that gives farmers instant overview.
- Complete Financial Clarity
- Cash Flow model (Cash is king)
- Unit Economics & Profitability Analysis
- Understandable Balance Sheet management & leveraging assets for access to finance
- Specific Business Case calculation for Investments in Equipment, New enterprises, Infrastructure
- Ability to quickly and easily model the financial consequence of decisions (scenarios etc.)
- Collecting financial data from Accounting software and other APIs for benchmarking
- Keeping a key account manager as contact point for each region
- Linked to Carbon Accounting / EOV?
- Vetting of Farm/Agri Businesses for FarmStarter
Will likely need a solid Customer Success team, both because a lot of farm context-specific things need to come together, but also simply because farmers seem to want someone they know they can always call that they trust to help stay on top of the finances.
But I would consider it a big success, if we could take this from one fulltime farm finance consultant (fractional CFO) properly servicing 4-5 clients simultaneously to properly servicing 20 or 30 clients at a time, assisted by technology and templates.
3. FarmStarter
Essentially a “Kickstarter for regen farms”. Not too far from the “Steward” model, but likely starting from the gathering of demand for actual produce/products. Gather Capital from partnering funds for investments in individual Regen Farm Transitions or new stacked enterprises inlc. Pre-purchasing of products from the farming operations and option to crowdinvest.
- links to appropriate investment funds and/or cooperative banks, things like Andelsgaarde in Denmark etc.).
For What?
- Existing farms in need of financial support for their regen transition
- Or starting a new stacked enterprise on the farm
- Financing new Share-farming (Joint Venture) enterprises on existing farms
- Starting entirely new farms
The crowdfacing part would be connected with a Partnership Portal:
- Access to steady sales channels (bigger regeneratively minded supply chains, needs to be defined btw.)
- Access to Humus Cooperative functions (economies of scale/scope)
4. Share-Farming (Joint Venture) matching platform for Regen Ag
As a landowner, it is impossible to establish, commercialise and run all the potentially beneficial stacked enterprises on a polyculture regenerative farm, and qualified farm labour is often very hard to find.
As an aspiring regenerative farmer or agribusiness owner, it is very hard to find land and the right collaborators that could lighten the heavy burden of upfront investments.
By helping these two groups of people to find each other in a facilitated process, we could drastically increase the amount regenerative farm businesses in Europe.
- Matching farmland owners with Joint Venture (sharefarming) partners - Landowners and Landseekers - in a facilitated mutual recruiting process, using Holistic Contexts, guiding templates and campaigns to increase success rate, ease of completion and speed.
- Can be extended to gather AgriBusiness Partners, downstream/upstream in Value chain.
- Can also include a “incubator for cooperatives” function, in lack of better words.
How to start? By collecting skin-in-the-game commitments from the customer/user groups
- Farmland owners with land already moving (or wanting to move) in Regen direction
- Land seekers for regeneratve farm enterprises
- AgriBusiness partners up/down stream
5. Farm Subsidy & Grant scanner
Automating the process of finding and applying for appropriate funding sources for Regen Farms, incl. Farms transitioning, rewilding areas or establishing agroforestry.