Rural Regenerative Agricultural Districts: Accelerating the Adoption of Regenerative Agricultural Practices in U.S. Farm Communities through the Development of an Innovative Financing Mechanism

Rural farming communities today are facing a fresh wave of financial challenges, associated with extreme weather events and a rising tide of loan defaults and bankruptcies. In many rural places, farming is literally losing ground. At the same time, growing numbers of farmers are embracing more resilient, regenerative agriculture strategies that explicitly seek to improve soil health and enhance rural community wealth. Building upon best-in-class conservation practices, regenerative agriculture aims to work with natural systems to restore, improve, and enhance the biological vitality, carrying capacity, and “ecosystem services” of rural farming landscapes. The benefits and outcomes of these practices include not only healthier soils but also enhancements in biodiversity, water quality, and more resilient rural communities. This constellation of benefits associated with building both soil health and rural wealth through regenerative agriculture is what we call “Soil Wealth.”
Today, investing in soil wealth is limited by the number of appropriate mechanisms available to ease the financial burdens of these agricultural transitions. This project proposes to develop an innovative place-based financing model to address some of these barriers. Innovative work will be carried out in this project through the development of the Rural Regenerative Agricultural District concept, which will explore both the possibility of a voluntary improvement district, legislatively designated districts, and/or collaboration with existing soil and water conservation districts; by studying the feasibility of the soil wealth improvement mechanism as a financing technique, through the exploration of both public and private approaches to property-assessed-type financing; and through the development of an implementation roadmap to support states and localities to develop these districts that would include a pilot financing program outline to model this mechanism on the private side and a marketing platform to attract private investors to finance these kinds of soil wealth improvements. Project partners and project advisory council members will be integral parts of all project work. Our proposed place-based financial model is designed to benefit producers adopting regenerative and soil health improvement practices, providing them with much-needed upfront capital to make substantial improvements on their land and in their operations.