Biome Capital | 02/24

Agriculture touches everything. It’s one of the most intimate relationships humans can have with the planet, from the food we eat to the fibers we wear. As a sector, it’s the single largest employer on Earth, and the consequences of our agricultural acts meaningfully cross over into human health outcomes, community prosperity, national security, and geopolitics.

The systems we have assembled to deliver these crucial products and services have been enabled by convenience, efficiency, colonialism and extraction. They are, at their core, solely justified and measured by profit. The systems are not wholly broken– they are delivering what was promised by their design– maximum calories at minimal cost; however, the inputs to this machine are starting to crumble under their own weight. The land, the water, the people who plant, tend, harvest and deliver the crops continue to give without rejuvenation. We have reached the limits of extraction.

Biome Capital emerged from a collective dialogue among accomplished professionals spanning agriculture, health, and finance. The conversation started as a series of questions– what is the right interface between regeneration and capital? Which shared convictions need to be established between producers and investors that result in prosperity for land and people? What financial vehicles are required to meet the scale of the transition ahead of us? What is the language we’ll use so that these two spaces can find a deeper understanding and a mutually beneficial relationship with one another?

Two years later, hundreds of hours of kitchen table conversations, walking acreage, listening and learning, and we’ve arrived at the precipice of a first close on our Farmland Ecosystem Fund, along with a robust pipeline of best-in-class farmer partners ready to live these questions alongside us. We’ve built a strategic approach to regenerative investment that holds several principles close to heart.

• Equity is empathy. Nothing aligns interests like equity partnership. The regenerative food systems of the future, at any scale, will require parity in the relationship between capital and producers. Return is a consequence of good stewardship, not the sole objective.

• Profitability need not be a result of extraction. If we are intentional in our designs for widespread prosperity for all stakeholders, then, we believe, it can be so. Profitability cannot come at the expense of regenerative outcomes. Regenerative outcomes without a return on investment will also fall short.

• Capital is not soil. Capital is not the foundation of resilient foodways, but it can catalyze a system to move. Our job as capital allocators is to design models that find the right relationship with money and food systems. Capital is a flow; and like any flowing element in a landscape, it can be used wisely or wastefully.

• This is a dance, not a fight. The role of capital today is to align what we value most about our food system, stewardship, and community prosperity, with what the financial system values. There will be give and take from each side.

• Convenience drives extraction. Relationship with place gives crucial context to the cost of convenience. Our current slew of tools connecting consumption and place are likely insufficient. Carbon markets are a clumsy proxy for financialization of the environment, just as certification is a sloppy proxy for positive environmental outcomes. Let’s focus on the deed, not the merit badge.

• Funds can change the world. Some of the most dynamic and impressive folks I know are working at this intersection, and it’s not just the ones with the traditional investment pedigree– it’s also the farmers and operators courageously jumping into the fray to learn and co-develop what solutions ought to look like.

To me, regeneration is all about relationships. An awareness of the interconnectedness of all things and an inherent directive to further that connectivity. It is both a seeking and an unfolding that makes it difficult to measure, benchmark, milestone, or mandate. To those who find themselves on the regenerative path, there is something essential and right about the experience– a sense of aliveness that flows from place to person to plant to animal, to community, to watershed. Investment in regeneration should be a part of this web.

Why then, do we invest like a monocrop? Parsing our asset classes into tidy columns only to hit barriers on either side of the value chain will continue to give us isolated results that lack true resilience. Investing in the “perfect regenerative farm” may leave us stuck when our products have nowhere to be processed or made available to markets.

Biome Capital invests across asset classes spanning the risk return spectrum. Though we identify most strongly as a real asset farmland fund, investing equity alongside our farmer partners, we have latitude to allocate to agtech (venture), infrastructure (private equity), and consumer brands that directly tie value back to the land portfolio. We are focused on 2-3 bioregions across the US and have emphasized specialty crops in food and fiber as early targets because of their high likelihood of realizing the benefits of regenerative management. We believe the best outcomes start at the relationship between farmers and land, so we seek proven farmer partners with deep connection to the land they steward.

We do these things in pursuit of a robust methodology that cuts a path to institutional pools of capital that will be required to scale regenerative agriculture. We describe our work not just in terms of an isolated fund, but as a regenerative investment platform. The goal is not defined by fringe ways of stewarding land, bespoke supply chains, or onerous certification standards– it’s to make regenerative management into conventional agriculture 2.0, the baseline standard. In order for this to happen, operating regeneratively needs to be profitable for all stakeholders, scalable to all crops, and meaningfully contribute to resilience in the face of changing climate.

Our job today is to finance a means to pursue our thesis and roadmap. Our job tomorrow is to open the floodgates on the things that work best. We invite you to join us on this journey and become a partner in prosperity for people and planet.