By Alex Wilkins
NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / October 23, 2024 / Cisco Systems Inc.
Meet four Cisco Foundation partners working to support farmers' transition to regenerative practices to improve resiliency and mitigate the climate crisis.
As the world faces the impacts of climate change, such as soil degradation, biodiversity die-off, and water pollution, regenerative agriculture has emerged as a pathway to restore our relationship with the earth and the food it provides us.
Regenerative agriculture practices like cover cropping, no-till farming, and crop rotation help restore organic matter in soil, increasing its ability to retain water and nutrients. Healthy soil is not only more productive but also resilient to droughts and floods, reducing the risks for farmers and stabilizing crop yields. These practices can also enhance the soil's ability to sequester carbon, turning farms into carbon sinks rather than sources of emissions. Regenerative agricultural practices not only mitigate the climate crisis in the first place, but can also help improve farmer crop yield, increase income, and provide a buffer to climate shocks.
However, the transition to regenerative agriculture is not without challenges. The shift often comes with financial and administrative burdens, especially for smallholder farmers who are pioneering these new practices. Farmers may need to invest in new machinery, seeds for cover crops, and time to learn new techniques as well as provide evidence of their climate impact - all of which come with financial inputs. Applying for grants, loans, or subsidies to support the transition can also be time-consuming and complex, placing an additional burden on farmers already juggling the day-to-day demands of running their farms. These challenges pose barriers to widespread adoption.
In 2021, the Cisco Foundation committed US$100 million over 10 years to fund nonprofit grants and impact investing in climate solutions. Across the Foundation, we apply a multi-sector approach across all our sector areas to create a world of equitable, resilient, and empowered communities contributing to a regenerative climate future. Meet four Cisco Foundation partners that are paving the way for regenerative agricultural practices to happen more efficiently, equitably, and at greater scale.
One Acre Fund: Climate resilience for Sub-Saharan African farmers
The majority of people living in poverty around the globe are smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, who are increasingly caught between two of this century's defining challenges: extreme poverty and climate change. In Africa, these challenges are mutually reinforcing - farmers in poverty, lacking other income avenues, often resort to deforestation, land conversion, nutrient mining, and other unsustainable practices to survive. Over time, these actions degrade the environment, worsen climate change, lead to yield declines and higher risk to frequent shocks like floods and droughts. This cycle can devastate harvests, leaving smallholders without enough food for their families.
One Acre Fund (1AF) provides farmers with financing, training, and supplies to transform their harvests through a climate strategy focused on adaptation (building resilience to climate shocks) and mitigation (sustainably increasing yields and protecting resources). The strategy is based on four pillars: maximizing plant health; building soil fertility; crop and income diversity; and providing safety nets. The Cisco Foundation has supported 1AF to pioneer a new, tech-enabled approach to the data collection needed to drive this work forward at scale: remote sensing (RS).
RS technology is poised to significantly improve 1AF's ability to efficiently access and leverage robust and accurate data, enabling deepened climate resilience and impact for Africa's smallholder farmers. For example, RS data can increase the accuracy of insurance products, ensuring that farmers' investments are protected when their crops are lost to climate shocks. 1AF is using this technology to offer farmers precise field-level guidance on seed type, planting times, soil maintenance, and more, generating better results than current district-level guidance.
Mad Agriculture: Supporting Regenerative farmers in the United States
Founded in 2018, Mad Agriculture takes a holistic approach to helping farmers in the United States thrive in regenerative organic agriculture. The organization's mission is to create a regenerative revolution in agriculture, envisioning a world where land, sea, and people flourish together. Mad Agriculture offers a suite of services that help farmers and ranchers overcome technical, financial, and market barriers, and lifting their stories of success and challenge into wider society to spark cultural change.
To succeed, farming and ranching must be done in harmony with nature and the greater ecosystem. This can both reduce conventional farming's negative impact on the land and enhance the farm ecosystem, while ensuring the people involved are thriving. This agricultural revolution takes time and must be lasting, requiring more capital to address inequitable wealth distribution. Mad Agriculture engages with essential questions: What does the land need? How can agroecosystems be designed to honor people and place? And how can those caring for the land be ensured access to the resources they need?
With these questions in mind, the Cisco Foundation has funded Mad Agriculture's work with farmers across the U.S., beginning the focus predominately in the Intermountain West, Great Plains, Midwest, and Southeast. Through the Regenerative Catalyst Fund, Mad Agriculture helps farmers move from planning to action, offering small grants, 0% loans, cost-sharing opportunities, and other innovative financing models. In 2024, $500,000 was provided to over 30 farmers for regenerative practices such as prairie strips, perennial plantings (including trees, hedgerows, pollinator habitats, and silvopasture), and fencing for holistic grazing. In addition to ecological expertise, Mad Agriculture brings business acumen to support farmers in their full complexity, including enabling irrigation systems, agrotourism, and winning larger grants.
myAgro - Designing mobile tools that connect farmers in West Africa with climate-smart solutions
myAgro is a nonprofit social enterprise that helps smallholder farmers in West Africa move out of poverty. With myAgro's mobile layaway platform, farmers make small payments towards climate-smart packages of seeds, fertilizer, and regenerative agriculture training that increase soil health, yields, and income - boosting climate resilience. In 2023, myAgro reported their farmers grew 179% more food and earned US$164 more than control farmers.
Central to myAgro's model are Village Entrepreneurs (VEs) - local sales ambassadors (primarily women) who help farmers enroll for packages and make payments. Initially VEs used paper ledgers to manage sales, but they eventually needed digital tools to serve a growing number of farmers in their communities. With support from the Cisco Foundation, myAgro developed the Connect mobile app, enabling VEs to manage sales, enroll farmers, and collect payments digitally. Since then, myAgro has upgraded the app with support from Cisco to generate customer target lists, facilitate mobile money payments, and make year-round package sales among other key features.
Ultimately, Connect has enabled VEs to link exponentially more farmers with the tools they need to increase their income through regenerative agriculture. In 2024, myAgro is on track to serve more than 280,000 farmers in Mali, Senegal, and Cóte d'Ivoire.
"I was drawn to myAgro's holistic approach towards farming, which emphasized the importance of sustainable techniques and access to quality inputs. Through myAgro's training programs, I gained valuable insights into soil management, seed selection, and crop rotation, which have been instrumental in optimizing my farm's productivity." - Mercedes Coly, myAgro Farmer in Senegal
Miraterra: A completely new way to look at soil
Miraterra is transforming measurement in the food system starting with soil. With 95% of food grown in soil, improving soil health and halting degradation is crucial for our food system. Regenerative agriculture practices build healthier, more resilient soil, yielding nutrient-rich plants and food. However, a comprehensive measurement system has been lacking. Miraterra, supported in part by a direct investment from the Cisco Foundation impact investing portfolio, is filling this gap by developing technology that analyzes unprocessed soil, providing accurate, affordable, and repeatable soil measurement not achieved by conventional methods, enhancing confidence and integrity at scale.
Their technology quantifies the benefits of practices such as cover cropping, 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.
Collaborating with agricultural testing laboratories across North America, Miraterra helps growers and agronomists quantify and support healthy land practices. They are also developing AI-powered tools to correlate land practices with food nutrition and enable growers to interact with a living record of their land. By providing accurate, affordable, and rapid soil analysis, Miraterra empowers farmers to make informed decisions about soil management, ultimately contributing to improved soil health and increased 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 skills, infrastructure and economic foundation to build resilient communities that can better withstand the consequences of climate change.
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