While it's generally understood that soil health practices (like cover cropping, reduced tillage or crop rotations) significantly reduce risk (such as the impacts of flood and drought), making farmers more resilient to increasingly extreme weather, the institutions that price risk––such as lenders and insurers, do not currently incorporate soil health into their pricing. This results in a massive missed opportunity that could spark an unprecedented transition to climate-friendly agriculture via new incentives.

Over the last two years, we have convened a world-class, cross-sector working group that is building an actuarially-sound, predictive model that quantifies the risk-mitigation benefits associated with specific soil health practices. The model uses satellite imagery to quantify the impacts of soil health practices on crop yields, enabling lenders, insurers and investors to offer new incentives (eg. better terms, cheaper loans or discounted policies) for farmers, accurately reflecting the mutual economic benefits to all parties when specific practices are applied. 

We believe this tool will pave the way to fund a large-scale transition to a regenerative, soil health-centered, carbon sequestering, ecosystem-restoring agriculture.