When Propagate was founded in 2017, its mission was both simple and ambitious: make agroforestry easier for US. farmers and landowners to adopt.
Agroforestry – the intentional integration of fruit, nut and timber trees with animal or crop farming systems – sits at the intersection of agriculture, forestry, finance, and climate. It holds the potential to address environmental and ecological degradation created by conventional and mono-cropping production systems, supply nutrient dense food, and create diversified revenue streams for producers, while potentially improving profit.
From the outset, the team – led by co-founders Ethan Steinberg, Jeremy Kaufman, and Harry Greene – recognized this potential and understood that lack of interest was not the core constraint. Risk was.
Risk had worked to quietly slow adoption for decades. Propagate’s early work focused on reducing those barriers – first by addressing operational risk, and later by systematically tackling the business and financial risks that emerge as agroforestry moves from pilot projects to commercial scale. By doing so, the company has developed an ecosystem of support services to enable adoption and has played a pivotal role in building agroforestry into a viable solution for ecological and financial transformation in U.S. agricultural systems.
Today, the company is laser-focused on the next big step for scaling agroforestry: stabilizing farms for long-term success, which requires ensuring the existence and durability of the systems around them – on and off the farm.
Building an Agroforestry Ecosystem: A Model That Works
For agroforestry to scale in the U.S., the sector’s barriers to adoption had to be addressed holistically – something no single product or service could achieve alone. Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all solution, Propagate built an ecosystem of complementary services and sister businesses, each designed to remove a specific bottleneck along the lifecycle of a farm’s transition. Co-founder and CEO Ethan Steinberg describes this as “building the connective tissue that links agroforestry efforts across regions.”
The ecosystem they’ve built to accomplish this includes:
- Technical assistance and project development
- Software and data to reduce uncertainty
- Nursery and land access structures
- Capital and ownership frameworks aligned with perennial assets
- Market pathways that ensure crops have a home once they mature
This modular approach allows Propagate to remain flexible while still maintaining consistent operating standards across regions. It enables the company to partner where it makes sense, build where it’s necessary, and evolve as the sector matures – without sacrificing performance.
“Agroforestry projects unfold over decades, not quarters,” explains Steinberg. Propagate’s ecosystem approach has allowed the company to learn faster without over-optimizing too early.
Rather than betting on a single model, the team has been able to test assumptions, respond to farmer and market feedback, and refine what actually works in practice.
It has also positioned Propagate as a connector – linking farmers, nurseries, investors, brands, and policymakers – rather than a service provider operating in isolation.
But this ecosystem wasn’t built all at once. It emerged over time – each piece added in response to a specific constraint encountered in the field.
The Early Years: Seeding an Idea
In its earliest phase, Propagate concentrated on reducing operational risk through software and technical assistance. The goal was to make agroforestry systems easier to design, easier to manage, and easier to evaluate economically.
The company’s software, Overyield, removes design and planning friction, and today has supported plans for more than 3,000 farms, representing more than 500,000 acres of tree planting projects across 4 continents. As adoption grew, those digital tools were paired with hands-on services to ensure projects could actually be implemented and stewarded successfully in real-world conditions. Once that friction is gone, economies of scale and economies of place become possible – but only if the surrounding system exists.
In the early years, Propagate’s work was funded through bootstrapping, friends-and-family and angel capital. In addition, participation in start-up programs like Techstars and Elemental proved to be formative. That early support enabled pilot projects, market validation, and refinement of its go-to-market strategy before raising institutional capital. The company closed a seed round of $1.5 million in 2020, led by Boston-based Neglected Climate Opportunities, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust.
Source: Propagate
The Evolution: Nurturing the Sapling
As Propagate went deeper into the work, new constraints came into focus. Nursery supply chains and land access structures emerged as significant bottlenecks – limitations that had little to do with farmer interest and everything to do with missing infrastructure. In response, Propagate built long-term nursery relationships and helped launch the first commercial land lease for agroforestry in the United States, removing friction that had quietly capped scale.
Between 2022 and 2025, as operational barriers eased and interest accelerated, the company turned its attention to financial risk. Propagate worked to open access to public and private funding channels that could support responsible expansion. Federal and philanthropic funding – such as USDA Climate-Smart Commodities and related programs – played a catalytic role by supporting early adoption, technical assistance, and supply chain development. These sources have been critical at a specific stage of the sector’s growth, though for Propagate it is clear they are not the long-term engine of scale.
Helping fuel this work was a $10 million Series A round raised in 2022 with participation from a range of family offices, corporate venture and social venture investors. In 2024, Steinberg spoke of the power of the capital that Propagate has raised, telling RFSI News, “Funding has truly been a game-changer for our company, significantly enhancing our ability to scale operations and accelerate innovation. With it, we’ve developed software that improves speed and efficiency in the industry, enabling us to serve landowners more effectively and provide reliable data to project investors… and launched additional agroforestry projects, offering concrete examples of how regenerative agroforestry can be successfully implemented.”
Alongside capital to help increase accessibility to agroforestry tools, Propagate has focused on partnerships, such as with Rodale Institute, to help bring agroforestry to more organic growers.
The numbers speak for themselves: by the end of 2024 Propagate had planted more than 211,000 trees and shrubs since 2020, helping establish the largest agroforestry operation in the U.S.
Source: Propagate
What Comes Next: Bearing Fruit
With meaningful progress over the past eight years, agroforestry in the U.S. is in an important stage of development. For the sector to reach its full potential, says Harry Greene, Chief Research Officer, several pieces must mature together:
- Markets for agroforestry commodities
- Demand for agroforestry products that supports long-term price stability
- Capital structures designed for perennial systems and their unique time frames
Until these elements align, agroforestry will remain promising – but under-scaled.
Against this backdrop, Propagate’s focus has evolved once again to reflect the needs of a maturing sector. Its work is no longer about proving that agroforestry can work in the field. It can. The focus now is on building the infrastructure, markets, and the operating discipline required for it to endure and succeed in the long-term. This includes partnerships, such as the one announced earlier this year between Propagate and WholeTrees, connecting agroforestry crops to the end market.
Beyond planting new acres, the company is now focused on stabilizing farms – economically and ecologically – that have already been established. They’re doing this by, again, addressing risks – this time by systematically reducing biological, market, and execution risk. The goal is to help these established agroforestry systems perform predictably over decades and mature into durable, revenue-generating assets.
This stabilization will not be accomplished through a single intervention, but through the development of a full agroforestry production and supply system designed for long-term success. In practice, this means supporting strong farm management through the most vulnerable early years – helping farms move through the inevitable “J-curve” of perennial systems, for example. And as farms approach breakeven, downstream infrastructure becomes increasingly critical, so stabilization means reducing exposure to volatile inputs and commodity markets, aligning incentives across farmers, landowners, and capital providers, and preparing farms to capture value as they reach commercial maturity within coordinated regional supply systems.
“These farms are the strongest proof points the sector has,” Jeremy Kaufman, COO notes. “As they reach commercial maturity, access to reliable markets for agroforestry commodities – and the ability to aggregate, standardize, and deliver consistent supply – becomes the defining factor for long-term success and continued adoption.”
Investing in the Next Chapter
With this in mind, Propagate expects to raise capital again in the near term, likely through structures that differ from traditional venture rounds. The focus this time around will be on partners who understand long-duration assets and are aligned with building real agricultural infrastructure.
“To scale sustainably, farmers need stable, reliable markets for agroforestry commodities,” Steinberg emphasizes. “That means investment in processing, aggregation, distribution, and offtake – not just planting. Without that, we risk funding activity without fully funding outcomes.”
If Propagate has learned anything about the types of capital needed to grow both the company and the sector, it’s this: not all capital is equal.
Steinberg explains, “Misaligned capital can slow progress faster than almost anything else. Agroforestry rewards patience, humility, and structures that reflect the natural world. The most effective partners understand that resilience, adaptability, and operational excellence, not speed alone, is what ultimately creates long-term value.”
As he puts it: “Trees operate on biological timelines. Capital must do the same.”
The next chapter for agroforestry is less about rapid expansion and more about getting the system right – managing risk, building resilience, and compounding progress over time. If that foundation holds, growth will follow.
To learn more about Propagate, visit the website here.
Sarah Day Levesque is Managing Director at RFSI & Editor of RFSI News. She can be reached here.