Cultivating Innovation

The Nature Conservancy is investing in a range of innovative technologies and tools that can help accelerate the pace at which the agriculture sector can adopt regenerative agriculture practices, thus building a more resilient system that benefits people, climate and nature.

Pilot projects are critical to these efforts. Providing proof of concept for innovative solutions, pilots are opportunities to explore risk mitigation through on-the-ground testing, assessing outcomes and refining strategies on a small scale before full implementation.

TNC scientists, local experts and teams, and business partners collaborate to design and implement these pilots. Together, we are enabling fast learning, more nimble execution and the potential for large-scale replicability.

Developing and Testing Assumptions

Through initial pilot projects and the critical learnings and input gained, the Agriculture Innovation Strategy team has built out a dynamic framework that can be used by future agriculture innovation pilots. The framework centers on three primary assumptions to assess technology and solutions for both environmental and business outcomes: Value, Growth and Impact.

For each of these assumptions, TNC develops targeted measurements that are specific to the context and desired outcome of each pilot.

Local Pilots to Paradigm Shifts

Strong science and local expertise, paired with deep connections within the agriculture industry, uniquely position TNC to pilot these innovative solutions. By sharing lessons learned with the broader ecosystem, TNC and partners can drive market change toward the scaling of regenerative agriculture solutions for the benefit of people, climate and nature.

Warranty Pilot Projects

TNC and Growers Edge, a financial technology (or fintech) company, co-developed an agronomic-backed warranty product designed to mitigate risk for both farm operations and agriculture retailers who want to test regenerative practices. Two concurrent pilot projects were implemented from 2021 to 2023: one in Iowa, with a focus on cover crops, and the other in the Chesapeake Bay region, which centered on nutrient management practices. As major producers of corn and soy, both regions have a critical impact on the Mississippi River Basin and the Chesapeake Bay, respectively.

According to Growers Edge, “The warranty acts like a safety net for farm businesses: it’s designed to protect from financial risk if specific products or practices don’t deliver the promised results. This means farm operations can try out everything from seeds to soil amendments, and if the crop fails to meet pre-established yield benchmarks, they can cash in on the warranty to mitigate losses.”

For agriculture retailers, the warranty enables them to recommend regenerative products, processes and options with confidence, and without concern about yield losses for their customers. TNC provided up to 50% cost share of the warranty payments (if triggered) to participating farm service providers and agriculture retailers.

Key Takeaways

Interviews with 16 agronomists and farm operators from the two geographies led to the following key takeaways:

Warranty Boosts Confidence

Agriculture retailers were more confident selling regenerative products and services, as well as experimenting with new options, due to reduced reputational risk. The warranty also increased the willingness of farm operations to use a set of new products. Even without officially enrolling, the warranty offers alone encouraged farm operations to implement covered practices.

Trusted Advisors Are Critical

Advisors, who are farm operations’ trusted sources for agronomic information, inputs and application services, played a critical role in encouraging farmer program participation and, ultimately, practice adoption. In these pilots, the advisors were part of private sector, fertilizer dealer affiliated entities.

Profit Drives Decisions

The agricultural market moderates the impact of the warranty on farm behavior. The warranty does not change the economics of agricultural production. Farmers still depend on making a profit in agriculture; as the market is currently structured, this is largely dependent upon maximizing yields. Given the cost of the warrantied products, such as biologicals, farmers felt compelled to pursue increased yields. Greater yields, rather than reduced fertilizer use and costs, were seen as more likely to cover the cost of the product.

Ease of Implementation Matters

The yield warranty is more successful with practices that are “easy” to implement and when short-term economic risk is the major concern, such as utilizing alternative biological products. For practices that are “harder” to implement and/or measure, such as cover crops, a benefit/establishment warranty instead of or in combination with a yield warranty could better serve farmers.

Potential Improvements for the Offer

There should be opportunities for in-field testing and comparison of the practices and products covered by the warranty against baseline practices. This will help farm operations answer the question: “Did it work this year?” Additionally, the warranty could allow greater flexibility in which practices and products are warrantied and simplify the offer by not bundling multiple practices and products together.

Future Iterations and Additional Assumptions

The first iteration of these pilot projects also identified new assumptions that need to be tested in future iterations, as well as additional data that should be collected. The following are key questions to be explored in future iterations and/or by other ecosystem actors:

• If the warranty is short-term, does it lead to long-term adoption of regenerative practices?​ Does a long-term warranty have a different impact?
• How does the warranty compare to and/or complement other interventions, such as traditional cost share?
• To what degree does the warranty promote practice adoption among farm operations that did not enroll in the offer?
• How can TNC and partners reach beyond early adopters to a large majority of farm operations?
• If the warranty focused on alternative management outcomes instead of yield, such as profitability or environmental achievements, how would adoption be impacted?
• Would assumptions for the warranty be validated or invalidated when it is applied to other crop or farming systems?

Acceleration in Progress

Building on the learnings from this pilot, Growers Edge is currently working with public and private collaborators to scale its warranty offer across almost one million acres—an effort supported through the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities awards program and other initiatives.

Entrepreneur in Residence

Ask any entrepreneur—it takes moxie and an innovative spirit to be successful in business. Entrepreneurs are comfortable with taking risks and navigating uncertainty in a fast-paced business environment with their sights often set on system disruption through the creation of new solutions. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) embraced this entrepreneur mindset and applied it to one of our biggest conservation challenges: protecting and improving North America’s rapidly vanishing grasslands.

In 2024, TNC hired an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) to help meet the goal of conserving 240 million acres of grazing lands in the United States by 2030. One of the most degraded and least protected ecosystems in the world, healthy, intact grasslands are vital to the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

With only 38% of North America’s grasslands remaining today, a good portion of which is severely degraded, TNC looked to an entrepreneur to help turn the tide on grasslands conservation.

Understanding Gaps and Finding Solutions

The EIR considered finding or developing a piece of technology that would help expand regenerative grazing practices to avoid grassland conversion and improve land management and ecological health. Analyzing more than 500 tools and products and speaking directly with ranchers and producers, though, led them in a completely different direction.

“For projects like these, it’s good to have a north star,” says Jacob Young of the EIR team. “But you don’t want to set the deliverable just yet, because that can pigeonhole or silo your way of thinking. You want to figure out what will actually elicit change.”

Solving the Missing Piece: Ranch Advisors

"Ranch advisors and advisor networks play a key role in aiding ranchers in identifying programs, tools and practices that make ranching operations more profitable, effective and efficient,” says Carson Sleep, a 6th generation rancher and a member of the EIR team. “By keeping more ranchers on the landscape and building grassland resilience and health, advisors can help build a thriving ranching industry and bring durability to rural communities.”

Although ranch advisors provide quality assistance to ranching operations, it became clear that the extent and consistency at which they are available is lacking and not comparable to what exists in other industries such as forestry and agronomy. These advisors are key for producers tasked with managing everything from finances to land management to animal husbandry, while navigating hundreds, if not thousands, of online tools and sources of information. That leaves little time or resources to collect and analyze the data needed—and create a plan—for transitioning to regenerative management practices.

“We’ve had talks with neighbors about pooling resources to hire our own range management expert,” says Daniel Mushrush, a rancher in the Kansas Flint Hills. “If I were a millionaire, hiring away our area range conservationist from NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] would be top of my list. It’s an underserved issue. On our own ranch, we are collecting data, but I think doing a poor job of developing the strategy and implementing a plan from it.”

This kind of feedback from ranchers, paired with the challenges identified in the gap analysis, led the EIR and TNC to land on a concept for a community-embedded, rancher-informed and market-driven technical assistance provider network at the regional level.

Outcomes: Did collaboration between the EIR and TNC work?

Before the collaboration began, TNC developed critical assumptions to assess whether this initiative had the intended outcomes. Although the tracking of some assumptions is ongoing, TNC determined that the majority of assumptions have been validated or demonstrated progress. This proves the collaboration had the intended results and is an effective tool to accelerate our intended impact.

Based on the outcomes of this collaboration and others, we are continuing to find ways to bring entrepreneurs onboard to work alongside our experts and scientists to accelerate systems-level change.