Meet four Cisco Foundation partners working to support farmers’ transition to regenerative practices to improve resilience and mitigate the climate crisis.
As the world confronts the impacts of climate change, including land degradation, biodiversity extinction, and water pollution, regenerative agriculture has emerged as a pathway to restoring our relationship with the Earth and the food it provides.
Regenerative agriculture practices such as cover crops, no-till agriculture, and crop rotation help restore organic matter in the soil, increasing its ability to retain water and nutrients. Healthy soils are not only more productive, but also more resilient to droughts and floods, reducing risk for farmers and stabilizing crop yields. These practices can also improve the soil’s ability to sequester carbon, turning farms into carbon sinks rather than emitters. Regenerative agricultural practices can help to not only mitigate the climate crisis in the first place, but also improve farmers’ crop yields, increase their incomes and provide a buffer against climate shocks.
However, the transition to regenerative agriculture is not without challenges. These changes often impose financial and administrative burdens, especially on small farmers who are pioneering these new practices. Farmers may need to invest in new machinery, cover crop seeds, and time to learn new technologies and provide evidence of climate impacts. All of this involves financial commitment. Applying for grants, loans or subsidies to support the transition can also be time-consuming and complex, placing additional burdens on farmers who are already handling the day-to-day requirements of farm operations. These challenges pose barriers to widespread adoption.
In 2021, the Cisco Foundation committed $100 million over 10 years to fund nonprofit grants and impact investments in climate solutions. Across the Foundation, we apply a multi-sector approach across all sector areas to create a world of equitable, resilient and empowered communities contributing to a renewable climate future. Meet four Cisco Foundation partners who are paving the way for regenerative agricultural practices to become more efficient, more equitable, and at larger scale.
One Acre Fund: Climate Resilience for Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa
The majority of people living in poverty globally are small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. They are increasingly caught between the two defining challenges of this century: extreme poverty and climate change. In Africa, these challenges are mutually reinforcing. Poor farmers lack other sources of income and often rely on deforestation, land conversion, nutrient extraction and other unsustainable practices to survive. Over time, these measures will degrade the environment, worsen climate change, reduce yields and increase the risk of frequent shocks such as floods and droughts. This cycle can destroy harvests, leaving smallholder farmers without enough food for their families.
One Acre Fund (1AF) provides farmers with financing, training and supplies to transform their yields through climate strategies focused on adaptation (building resilience to climate shocks) and mitigation (sustaining increased yields and protecting resources). do. This strategy maximizes plant health; building soil fertility; Crop and income diversity; And it provides a safety net. The Cisco Foundation supported 1AF to pioneer Remote Sensing (RS), a new technology-based approach to data collection needed to advance this work at scale.
RS technology is poised to significantly enhance 1AF’s ability to efficiently access and leverage robust, accurate data, strengthening climate resilience and impact for smallholder farmers in Africa. For example, RS data can increase the accuracy of insurance products to protect farmers’ investments when crops are lost to climate shocks. 1AF uses this technology to provide farmers with accurate field-level guidance on seed types, sowing times, soil maintenance, and more, producing better results than current district-level guidance.
Crazy Farming: Supporting America’s Regenerative Farmers
Founded in 2018, Mad Agriculture takes a holistic approach to helping American farmers succeed in regenerative organic agriculture. The organization’s mission is to spark a regenerative revolution in agriculture and envision a world where land, sea, and people thrive together. Mad Agriculture provides a suite of services to help farmers and ranchers overcome technical, financial and market barriers and spark cultural change by spreading the stories of their successes and challenges to the broader society.
To be successful, agriculture and ranching must work in harmony with nature and the larger ecosystem. This can reduce the negative impacts of conventional agriculture on the land and improve farm ecosystems, while ensuring prosperity for the people involved. This agricultural revolution will take time and must be sustained, and more capital will be needed to address the unequal distribution of wealth. Mad Agriculture engages with essential questions. What does land need? How can we design agroecosystems to respect people and place? And how can those who manage the land ensure access to the resources they need?
With these questions in mind, the Cisco Foundation funded Mad Agriculture’s work with farmers across the United States, beginning with a focus primarily on the Intermountain West, Great Plains, Midwest, and Southeast. Through its Regenerative Catalyst Fund, Mad Agriculture provides micro-grants, 0% loans, cost-sharing opportunities, and other innovative financing models to help farmers move from planning to action. In 2024, $500,000 was provided to more than 30 farmers for regenerative practices such as prairie strips, perennial plantings (including trees, hedges, pollinator habitat, and tree paddocks), and fences for overall grazing. In addition to ecological expertise, Mad Agriculture also provides business acumen to support farmers with all their complexities, including irrigation systems, agri-tourism, and obtaining larger subsidies.
myAgro — Climate-smart agricultural practices in Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast
myAgro is a non-profit social enterprise helping small-scale farmers in West Africa escape poverty. myAgro’s mobile layaway platform allows farmers to make micropayments for climate-smart packages, including seeds, fertilizers and regenerative agriculture training that increase soil health, yields and incomes, making them climate-resilient. In 2023, myAgro reported that their farmers grew 179% more food and earned US$164 more than the average farmer.
At the heart of the myAgro model are Village Entrepreneurs (VE). These are local sales ambassadors (often women) who help farmers register and pay for their packages. Initially, VE used paper ledgers to manage sales, but eventually needed digital tools to serve the growing number of farmers in the community. With support from the Cisco Foundation, myAgro developed the Connect mobile app to enable VEs to manage sales, register farmers, and collect payments digitally. Since then, myAgro has upgraded its app with support from Cisco to create targeted customer lists, facilitate mobile money payments, and enable year-round package sales, among other key features.
Ultimately, Connect will allow VE to connect exponentially more farmers with the tools they need to increase their income through regenerative agriculture. By 2024, myAgro will serve more than 280,000 farmers in Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast.
“I was attracted to myAgro’s holistic approach to farming, which emphasizes the importance of sustainable techniques and access to high-quality resources. Through myAgro’s training program, I gained valuable insights into soil management, seed selection and crop rotation, which played an important role in optimizing the productivity of my farm.” – Mercedes Coly, myAgro farmer in Senegal
Miraterra: A whole new way to look at soil
Miraterra is changing the way food systems are measured, starting with the soil. With 95% of our food grown in soil, improving soil health and preventing quality decline is critical to our food system. Regenerative agricultural practices create healthier, more resilient soils that produce nutrient-dense plants and food. However, a comprehensive measurement system was lacking. Miraterra, supported in part by direct investments from the Cisco Foundation Impact Investment Portfolio, is developing technology to analyze untreated soils to provide accurate, affordable, and repeatable soil measurements that cannot be achieved with traditional methods, with reliability and reliability at scale. We are filling this gap by improving integrity. .
Their technology quantifies the benefits of practices such as cover crops, reduced tillage, and residue detection at the end of the harvest season. These methods improve soil health, increase farm profitability and carbon sequestration, while reducing environmental impact.
Miraterra partners with agricultural testing laboratories across North America to help growers and agronomists quantify and support healthy land practices. They are also developing AI-based tools that link land practices with food nutrition and allow growers to interact with the living record of their land. By providing accurate, affordable and rapid soil analysis, Miraterra helps farmers make informed decisions about soil management, ultimately contributing to improving soil health and increasing carbon sequestration.
Cisco and the Cisco Foundation take a holistic approach to addressing environmental and social issues. Communities that can adapt to a changing climate have the right technology, infrastructure, and economic base to build resilient communities better able to withstand the consequences of climate change.
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