May 8, 2025

At the end of April, the Soil Wealth Areas team and the Lab hosted an intimate, virtual investor convening. The gathering provided a chance to update impact investors about our collaborative work in North Carolina to coordinate capital and technical assistance for farmers and entrepreneurs working in food, forest, fiber, value chains. 

We also had a chance to unpack the inspiring collaboration between Soil Wealth Areas, Rural Beacon Initiative, and Foodshed Capital that turned a trusted partnership and a 5% loan guarantee into a 5% owner equity option to purchase a 52-acre historical site for a regenerative agriculture sustainability hub. This activated a $125,000 0% loan from Foodshed Capital and allowed RBI to unlock $2.5 million of additional capital for the hub project.

During the gathering, nearly 20 financial and impact investing professionals met to share investment activities in the regenerative food, fiber, forestry space, plus identified critical needs for investors and opportunities for future collaborations to unlock aligned capital for underserved farmers and regenerative value chains in North Carolina.

The gathering provided a chance to share more about our pilots in North Carolina, including the recently started Ecosystem Service Landowner Support initiative. This project seeks to understand the full extent of opportunities and barriers for smallholder and underserved forest landowners in Tennessee and North Carolina watershed regions to participate in emerging ecosystem service markets, including both voluntary markets and compliance markets. 

Some emergent themes from our discussion included: 

• Investors and capital providers are seeking place-based partners to help them understand different geographies and collaborate with farmers on-the-ground to facilitate loans and implement goals. 
• A shift away from framing regenerative agriculture as a “premium” market benefit towards framing it as resilience “cost reduction” for producers as they navigate operating a small business with pressures like natural disasters, disparate regional networks, and more. There is a need for data to illustrate those cost reductions and the realization of regen ag benefits.  
• The need for strategies to refer borrowers to aligned technical assistance to support land stewards with business development, financial health, and discerning what type of financial partnerships are right for them. It is important to have capital (and other service) providers “walking alongside” land stewards/farmers. Supporting land stewards with things like infrastructure, not just land acquisition (and relatedly, the range of opportunities for capital providers beyond land acquisition and beyond the farmgate) amplifies the multiplier effect of small acts in de-risking a venture.  

We will continue to build from these insights to bring these necessary resources to impact investors looking to scale place-based investments in soil health and community wealth.  As our communities and partners navigate the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the federal funding chaos, the need for innovative, private capital to advance our collective work is more important than ever. 

Despite the challenges farmers and many of our own organizations currently face, we hope that this convening, one of the first initiatives of the Lab for Impact Finance, will energize our community and open new pathways to support these critical value chains. 

In the next phase of this work we will be: 

• Planning deep dive discussions with capital providers into the priorities identified
• Creating educational materials from convening participants to add to our FARMWISE Hub, which provides on-demand technical assistance and financial health  1-1 coaching for underserved communities to access aligned capital  

In the meantime, check out

• The Lab for Impact Finance
• Soil Wealth Areas 
• FARMWISE Hub