Climate Finance

Soil and Water Outcomes Fund

Current Locations: 26 states in the East and Midwest (view map)

Status: Active

Together with the Iowa Soybean Association, Quantified Ventures scaled an innovative, multi-payor financing vehicle to provide farmers with financial incentives to implement conservation practices that generate verifiable environmental outcomes like water quality improvement, soil carbon sequestration, biodiversity and habitat protection, and flood mitigation, while at the same time improving economic and ecological resilience for American farmers.

The Soil and Water Outcomes Fund is now managed by AgOutcomes, a subsidiary of the Iowa Soybean Association. Quantified Ventures is a founding partner of the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund.

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Problem

Maintaining water quality can be a challenge in agriculture-heavy watersheds and landscapes. Runoff from farm fields often contains sediment and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrate, leading to impairment of source water, increased treatment costs, and economic damages. Increasingly, municipalities are being forced to upgrade water and wastewater treatment plants to deal with these increased nutrient levels, which can strain municipal budgets and compete with other capital improvement priorities. State regulators and federal rulemakers continue to search for efficient solutions to water quality challenges, but while progress is being made, much work remains to address this important issue. 

Approach

The Soil and Water Outcomes Fund is a new-market-based approach to implementing regenerative agriculture on private lands, implemented through a partnership between Quantified Ventures (through its subsidiary ReHarvest Partners) and the Iowa Soybean Association (through its subsidiary AgOutcomes). The Soil and Water Outcomes Fund uses investor capital to provide financial incentives to farmers for the implementation of conservation practices that generate positive environmental outcomes such as water quality improvement and carbon sequestration. The stacking of multiple environmental outcomes together within a single transaction allows each beneficiary to pay only for the outcomes they desire rather than the full cost of program implementation. This approach is significantly more cost effective than existing “pay for practice” approaches to conservation. In addition, the stacking of multiple outcomes payments enables the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund to pay attractive per-acre payments to participating farmers that are in many cases greater than existing state, federal or private conservation programs.

Impact

During the past 2 years, the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund enrolled 240,000+ acres across 9 states, and provided an average financial incentive of more than $31 per acre to farmers and achieved the following environmental outcomes.

Our work with farmers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania sequestered 211,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents, which is equivalent to removing 46,000 cars from the road for a year.

In crop year 2024, the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund is expanding to 26 Eastern and Midwestern states. We believe this outcomes-based model of delivering verifiable environmental impact through an innovative public-private partnership between investors, farmers, and outcome purchasers is a scalable and replicable model that can be expanded to watersheds across the United States.

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