The Regenerative Agriculture Lending Initiative
Building the missing data layer to transform agriculture finance
Agricultural finance has a data problem
Agriculture in the United States is financed primarily through debt. But agricultural lending does not operate on financial information alone. It sits within an enormous infrastructure of federal loan guarantees, crop insurance, commodity programs, subsidies, historical yield data, production benchmarks, and other tools that help lenders understand, price, and manage agricultural risk.
Over decades, that infrastructure has created a deep body of information around conventional agriculture. Lenders can evaluate a borrower against historical yields, commodity prices, production records, insurance coverage, collateral values, and established benchmarks. Federal programs further absorb and redistribute risk throughout the system.
Regenerative, diversified, organic, transition-stage, and other non-conventional producers often do not fit neatly within that architecture. They may operate across multiple enterprises, rely on different revenue streams, lack comparable historical benchmarks, or have limited access to the risk-management programs that support conventional borrowers. The result is not necessarily that these farms are inherently riskier. It is that the financial system has less information with which to understand their risk.
REAL is building that missing data layer
The Regenerative Agriculture Lending Data Initiative (REAL) is building a continuously updated picture of how agricultural credit is structured, priced, underwritten, and performing across different production systems.
REAL brings together federal agricultural lending data with portfolio and loan-performance data from innovative and mission-driven lenders already financing producers who fall outside conventional underwriting models. We are examining not only who receives credit, but how loans are structured, how lenders assess and mitigate risk, what collateral and credit enhancements are used, why applications are approved or declined, and how those loans ultimately perform.
By standardizing information across lenders and datasets, REAL can begin separating perceived risk from actual risk and make successful alternative approaches visible to the broader financial system.
From evidence to a new underwriting playbook
Innovative agricultural lenders are already doing things differently. They are developing underwriting and servicing approaches that reflect real farm economics, diverse production systems, alternative revenue streams, and the realities of agricultural transition. But much of what they have learned remains fragmented across individual institutions and portfolios.
REAL is designed to turn that experience into shared financial infrastructure.
The goal is to build an evidence base that allows lenders to evaluate emerging approaches based on performance rather than assumption. Over time, REAL can help identify which underwriting practices work, where existing risk-support tools are effective, where structural gaps remain, and what new financial tools are needed.
Changing agricultural finance cannot depend on asking lenders to take a leap of faith. We need the data to show what is already working, translate those lessons into approaches other institutions can adopt, and give lenders the confidence to finance agriculture differently.
Partner with the REAL Data Initiative
REAL gets stronger as more of the agricultural finance ecosystem participates.
We are actively engaging lenders, researchers, public agencies, data providers, and other organizations with relevant agricultural lending, underwriting, portfolio, or performance data. We are particularly interested in working with institutions financing regenerative, diversified, organic, transitioning, and other producers whose operations may not be well represented in conventional agricultural datasets.
If you have data that can help us better understand the agricultural credit landscape, we would like to hear from you.