2025 was a defining year for agriculture, food, and investment. Capital deployment slowed from the highs of prior years, but momentum across regenerative agriculture and food systems held—driven by structural forces reshaping how investors think about risk, durability, and value creation. RFSI covered these shifts week by week in our newsletter. Here are the RFSI News stories that resonated most with our readers in 2025.
1. USDA’s New $700M Regenerative Ag Pilot: Opportunity, Uncertainty, and What Comes Next
In December, USDA Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a new $700 million Regenerative Agriculture Pilot program designed to help farmers adopt practices that improve soil health, enhance water quality, and boost long-term productivity, all while strengthening America’s food and fiber supply. The program, administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), has garnered excitement from around the sector for it focus on soil health and the connection to human health, as well as its focus on trying to make adoption of conservation practices less burdensome for farmers. The move is a resounding signal that investments in regenerative agriculture represent a powerful and growing opportunity. Yet the success of the pilot will ultimately depend heavily on the execution, and whether the conditions for success outside of the pilot are also supporting the transition toward regenerative.
2. Investing Where Health Begins: Regenerative Agriculture as a Health Solution
The chronic disease epidemic impacting the US and many countries around the globe isn’t just a healthcare problem – it’s an agricultural one, rooted in the way we grow, process, and consume our food. But within that problem lies a powerful opportunity. By recognizing investments in regenerative agriculture as not only an ecological imperative – but a critical public health opportunity – potential outcomes can be re-envisioned. Here, RFSI digs into what investment at the intersection of agriculture and human health looks like.
3. Lessons Learned in Early Stage Financing of Food Pioneers and Regenerative Agriculture
As the urgency to transform our food systems grows, regenerative agriculture has emerged as a beacon of hope, promising sustainability and resilience. As such, early-stage financing of regenerative farmers and food pioneers is crucial. Here DOEN Foundation’s Maarten Derksen highlights the pivotal role of flexible, trust-based funding in driving systemic change. Drawing on the experiences of the DOEN Foundation, it explores the challenges, successes, and essential lessons learned in supporting innovative agricultural practices and business models.
4. What Farmers Need from Capital Partners – 7 Tips for Being a Good Capital Partner to Farmers
The 2025 RFSI Forum kicked off this year with a conversation with farmers – the foundation of our food systems and the key to unlocking transition to healthier and more resilient agriculture and food. The dialogue featured four diverse farmers working with different crops, at different scales, in different regions of the country – and each with different capital needs. Moderating the conversation, John Kempf of Advancing EcoAgriculture wasted no time getting into the weeds with farmers about what they need from capital partners. Here are some key highlights from what they shared that can serve as powerful tips for capital allocators engaging in this space.
5. Clarity Before Capital: How Farms and Food Businesses Get Investment Ready
Capital – whether cultivated from within an operation or accessed via outside investment – is an essential ingredient to enable and fuel adoption of better practices, scale infrastructure, and ultimately make ecological regeneration economically viable. Simply put: capital isn’t just a financial ingredient – it’s an ecological one. Yet, as many founders and farmers discover, capital is one of the most difficult resources to cultivate. Fortunately, the team at Good Roots has created a winning strategy for getting farms and food businesses “investment-ready”, and it all starts with clarity. Here, they share what that looks like in practice and how to get started.
6. Introducing DiversiFund: A New Approach to Financing Regenerative Food Systems
Few financial institutions can say they’ve spent more than 40 years reimagining what money can do. California-based financial services organization Regenerative Social Finance (RSF) has done exactly that – evolving over decades of work to build a model that is driving regeneration through capital investment. RSF’s mission is to “change finance and finance change,” with a vision of building a world where all capital is regenerative – healing rather than harming, replenishing rather than extracting, and prioritizing the well-being of all over the wealth of a few. Within this broad mandate, regenerative agriculture and food have emerged as critical areas of focus.
7. Capital that Serves Life: How RSF is Changing Finance and Financing Change
A new systems-level investment vehicle aims to transform financing for regenerative food systems. DiversiFund addresses a critical gap with a flexible model tailored to system-based approaches, while tackling key barriers to food systems transition: infrastructure, capital access, data, insurance, and natural assets. Launched in the U.S. Upper Midwest with capabilities to scale globally, DiversiFund is strategically guided by Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS) and managed by Front Hill Partners.
8. From Soil to Strategy: The Questions Guiding Thoughtful Farmland Investment
As more investors turn their attention to agriculture, the question isn’t simply whether to invest in farmland, but how. Making informed investment decisions is critical to the positive transformation of farmland. The due diligence process offers more than a financial assessment – it’s an opportunity to understand how a farmland investment aligns with ecological stewardship, farmer well-being, human health and long-term resilience. Asking the right questions can illuminate whether an investment will create lasting value, or simply short-term returns. Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, PBC knows this well and understands that well-defined questions help translate broad ideals – like stewardship, impact, and resilience – into tangible insights as to how a business actually operates. Here, they share a series of key questions that create a framework for due diligence that goes beyond compliance – one that helps investors ensure their capital supports the kind of agriculture they want to see flourish.
9. New Agriculture Supply Chain Infrastructure Map Unlocks Opportunities for Future Investment
The transition to healthier, more resilient and regenerative agriculture and food systems presents a tremendous opportunity to address some of the planet’s most pressing challenges, including climate change, environmental degradation, and a human health and nutrition crisis. However, obstacles to transitioning to these systems remain, not the least of which is ensuring there is a functioning and accessible supply chain into which diverse, regenerative crops can flow post farmgate.
Without essential mid-supply chain infrastructure and information, it can be difficult for farmers and stakeholders across the value chain to market diversified crops. This can be a major impediment for farmers seeking to diversify their production systems and incorporate more regenerative soil health management practices, as well as to buyers seeking to source more sustainable ingredients – ultimately slowing the overall transition to a healthier food system. Investment in supply chains and infrastructure may provide a significant solution to this challenge but there is still a lot that needs to be understood about how to do that. With the launch of their new “Supply Chain Infrastructure Asset Map,” Builders Vision has set out to address this issue as a crucial initial step.
Systemic investing innovation lab, TransCap Initiative, announced the launch of Stage 2 of its systemic investing prototype – an ambitous project to design a new kind of systemic finance strategy and funding vehicle to support the transition to regenerative agriculture and food systems. With financial support from the Walton Family Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, Stage 2 of this project will feature a bold, six-month collaboration between 20 leading investor, funder, and farmer organizations to design a first-of-its-kind capital orchestrator—an innovative financial platform to align and deploy multiple capital types to build a sustainable and profitable future for the agricultural industry.
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