December 7, 2022

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

We have admittedly done a poor job in modernizing how we look at the profit and loss associated with farming. Higher crop yields and more animals, partnered with low cost of inputs, have traditionally meant higher profit. For centuries, the unaccounted losses tied to traditional extractive farming have been viewed as unavoidable, and inherent – but it need not be this way, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, who stated that a shift from extractive to regenerative agriculture is not only possible, but profitable, when taking a more modern, learned, and complete approach to the costs and output of agricultural production.

One promising facet of regenerative agriculture is agroforestry – not a newly developed methodology, but rather one that reaches back to harness the power that comes from working with nature and natural landscapes.

The Association of Temperate Agroforestry noted that there are five categories of agroforestry in North America, each of which brings its own benefits to farmers depending on their ultimate goals: windbreaks, alley cropping, silvopasture, riparian buffers, and forest farming.

No matter the type being employed, all agroforestry practices, if done correctly, the Association of Temperate Agroforestry explained, have four characteristics that set it apart from traditional farming or forestry:

~ Intentionality: the intentional design and management of trees, crops, and/or animals as a whole unit, rather than proximate systems.

~ Intensive management: the intensive management of agroforestry practices to maintain productivity and protective goals.

~ Interactive: the active manipulation of biological and physical interactions between crops, trees, and animals to concurrently enhance multiple harvestable components while also pursuing conservation of water and wildlife, for example.

~ Integration: whether integrated horizontally or vertically, or above or below ground level, the trees, crops, and/or animals are structured into a single integrated management unit to optimize productive capacity while balancing economic benefits with resource conservation.

Despite the multiple economic and ecological benefits that agroforestry can provide, today’s farmers face definite hurdles in implementation and design. However, now the opportunity to scale agroforestry is greater than ever, with $9 trillion earmarked for funding ESG initiatives between 2022-2025, and commitment from corporations to reduce emissions climbing, agroforestry is the most effective climate solution in existence today for the food and ag industry. 

Ready to help is Propagate – a commercial agroforestry platform that has recently closed a $10 million Series A led by Belgium-based The Nest, and including TELUS Pollinator fund for Good, Techstars, AgFunder, and Neglected Climate Opportunities, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, and others. 

Founded in 2017 as a Techstars-based company and a partner of the USDA’s Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities, Propagate works with farmers, agribusinesses, and service providers to design and install tree-crop systems that work in tandem with existing farming operations.

“Farms do not have the resources they need to win with agroforestry. There are hurdles around farm design, implementation, and financing that have slowed adoption,” said Ethan Steinberg, co-founder and CEO, Propagate.

“The lack of resources available to farmers has kept farms from realizing wins in profitability and carbon sequestration. Our platform is built around the hurdles that farms have shared with us. These insights have helped us create an ecosystem that can institutionalize the industry.”

The company’s ecosystem of products and services include:

Overyield: a SaaS-based regenerative farm planning and management software that provides farm design, crop suitability, and agronomic insights so that the costs, revenues, yield projects, and labor assumptions are transparent by crop and by year to ease implementation. 

Propagate stated that this platform can bring a project from the computer screen to productive agroforestry in a matter of hours – reducing the time to map out an installation from 80 hours to only eight.

The company also offers commercial agroforestry development through Propagate Farm Services. And as company CEO, Ethan Steinberg noted that there exists a 2-3x net increase in profitability per acre with the integration of agroforestry in the longer term, overcoming the finance gap is key to realizing agroforestry’s value. Therefore, the company launched Agroforestry Partners to provide investment for agroforestry transitions.

After raising $1.5 million in Seed funding in 2020, Propagate has doubled its business while planting an additional 37,000 trees in 2022 on farms in New York, Ohio, Kentucky, and Hawaii, among other locations, and has been awarded as a partner in a $60 million grant form the USDA Climate Smart Commodities program.

The capital gained through this Series A will support the company’s efforts to roll out profitability and production forecasting tools within its Overyield platform; to expand its team with additional experts; and to plant more trees on the 158 million acres of farmland suitable for tree crops in the U.S.

“Agroforestry is a crucial element in decarbonizing agriculture and has an amazing side effect of increasing financial resilience for farmers. It also requires a systems-approach to implement it on a large scale,” said Anouk Schoors, investment manager,The Nest.

“Propagate has been the most advanced, building the platform necessary for the institutional roll-out of agroforestry, bridging gaps and forging partnerships where needed. We are thrilled to join forces with them to continue to develop the market and add another tool for more regenerative farming to the mix.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

*The content put forth by Global AgInvesting News and its parent company HighQuest Partners is intended to be used and must be used for informational purposes only. All information or other material herein is not to be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Global AgInvesting and HighQuest Partners are not a fiduciary in any manner, and the reader assumes the sole responsibility of evaluating the merits and risks associated with the use of any information or other content on this site.