It's Finally Here! Regenerative Farm Management Strategic Planning

Together with Backswath Farm Management, and with the financial support of the On Farm Climate Action Fund, we're now forecasting and strategizing for land - beyond the current growing season.

Powered by Sustainable Grain’s long-term market forecasting for farm sales and expenses, Backswath is now offering landowners and farmers a new crop budgeting framework to forecast the  Return on Investment (ROI) over three years, from introducing grazing and intercropping into the crop rotation.

These 'business plans for fields' will take into account the current state of the fields, cropping history, farm management style and goals. They will incorporate multiple new revenue streams available to farmers right now and in the years ahead, including government payments, carbon sequestration programs, and market premiums. And they will contemplate ongoing steady reductions in crop input expenses.

Research suggests that grazing systems are the fastest and most resilient at restoring carbon, biodiversity, and water management capacity to fields. There are several market platforms offering payments to farmers who can demonstrate these accomplishments, and new systems for measuring, reporting, and validation (MRV).

To make the biggest and fastest improvements to soil health, it’s best to start with a ‘problem field’, where soils are particularly depleted, and/or there is an herbicide-resistant weed problem. Planting a multi-species pasture mix on that type of ground can go a long way to eliminating resistant weeds, in just one year, and the diversity of species quickly activates soil biology to start cycling nutrients. Over time, these actions steadily reduce the amount of chemical crop inputs required, for the field to turn a profit.  

Since these practices are more complicated to run budgets on than just comparing gross profits from grain sales to variable costs, it will also be more complicated to forecast the field’s potential change in profitability. But how else can the decision be made to adopt regenerative practices, other than based on profitability? Together with our ROI forecasts, we will create detailed action plans, provide access to new forecasting resources, and a support network to ensure the best chances of success for every field to achieve the farm's goals on the pathway to regeneration.

At the outset, Backswath’s new Regenerative Farm Business Management Support program aims to help farms tap into funding from the On Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF). In many areas, this program will finance and de-risk the transition of fields from monocrop, high-input, conventional management, into systems that support soil health and surrounding ecosystems. In other words, it’s no longer true that ‘nobody’s paying for regenerative’.

Over time, fields will require different and fewer input applications, leading to long-term economic resiliency. The environmental outcomes that result from introducing more diversity into a land management system will eventually earn the farm new market access, in addition to government payments, in exchange for providing data to quantify them. Through Backswath, we will also help landowners to capture and report this valuable data over time.

For more information start here: https://backswath.com/services/#farms. Click through to read the fact sheet on the program, and for contact information to learn more.

Author’s note: thank you for your patience as I gradually transition my reporting from MailChimp to Substack. I hope you’ll agree this platform offers more valuable functionality for communities of practice like this one to learn and engage. Stay tuned for new enhancements as I figure it all out, and more free research and analysis in the weeks ahead.