Guarantees for Regenerative Agriculture
Expanding access to capital for regenerative agriculture while building the data and underwriting models to put soil on the balance sheet.
Closing the Capital Gap for Regenerative Agriculture
Guarantees for Regenerative Agriculture (GRA) is the nation’s first pooled loan guarantee facility built specifically to expand access to fair, affordable capital for regenerative farmers, ranchers, and the mission-aligned lenders who support them. Regenerative producers, including diversified farmers, ranchers, and food businesses, are often excluded from conventional credit because traditional risk frameworks and federal safety net tools are tied to production systems that don’t reflect diversified, ecological operations.
By reducing lender risk through targeted guarantees, GRA unlocks mission-aligned financing from CDFIs, nonprofit loan funds, credit unions, and other innovative lenders, allowing them to provide loans that meet the real cash-flow and capital needs of regenerative producers. This helps farmers bridge cash-flow gaps, invest in regenerative practices, and grow resilient operations without sacrificing soil health or long-term viability.
GRA is not just about increasing access to capital today. It’s also about building the evidence base and infrastructure for long-term change in agricultural finance. By systematically capturing lending performance, underwriting insights, and risk outcomes, GRA creates a new data foundation that demonstrates how regenerative lending performs in practice, helping to inform policy reform and expand risk-support tools more broadly across the agricultural finance system.
In short, GRA delivers:
Capital today — By enabling lenders to extend affordable credit with confidence
Data to shift markets tomorrow — By building proof of performance for regenerative lending
A pathway to systemic change — By advancing risk tools that reward ecological outcomes and equitable access to credit
How GRA Works
Unlock Lending Where Traditional Finance Falls Short
GRA operates as a pooled loan guarantee facility that shares risk with mission-aligned lenders financing regenerative and diversified producers. Rather than lending directly to farmers or food businesses, GRA provides guarantees to qualifying lenders—such as CDFIs, nonprofit loan funds, and other innovative lenders—who are already working with regenerative operations on the ground.
Turn Shared Risk into More Flexible Capital
When a lender originates a loan to a regenerative producer, GRA can provide a guarantee on a portion of that loan. This risk-sharing mechanism helps lenders address common barriers such as limited collateral, lack of historical yield data, transition-period cash flow challenges, or ineligibility for federal farm safety net programs.
By reducing lender exposure, GRA enables more flexible underwriting, improves loan terms for borrowers, and expands the pool of producers who can access credit. Importantly, guarantees are structured on a case-by-case or portfolio basis, allowing GRA to adapt to different lending models, geographies, and borrower needs.
Multiply Philanthropic Impact Through An Innovative Guarantee Structure
GRA is backed by philanthropic and mission-aligned guarantors through a flexible guarantee model designed to maximize the impact of each commitment. Guarantors can participate through either an unfunded or funded guarantee structure.
Under the unfunded model, guarantors pledge assets to support their guarantee commitment while retaining and investing those assets unless a guarantee is called. Commitments may be supported by a range of philanthropic and institutional assets, including foundation and endowment portfolios and, through participating sponsors, donor-advised funds. Guarantors may also choose a funded structure, contributing the guarantee capital upfront.
In either model, philanthropic capital functions as a precise risk backstop, stepping in only where needed to absorb a defined portion of potential loan losses. This targeted use of capital can unlock significantly more private and mission-driven lending for regenerative agriculture than the guarantee commitment alone, multiplying the impact of each philanthropic dollar committed.
Build the Evidence to Change Agricultural Finance
In parallel, GRA aggregates and analyzes anonymized data on loan performance and underwriting practices. This data helps build the evidence base needed to demonstrate how regenerative lending performs in practice, inform future program design, and support broader policy and market shifts in agricultural finance.