Calm The Farm - New Environmental Finance Solutions
Calm The Farm is a venture set up by Toha Foundry to provide financial support and incentives to farmers who want to transition their farms from conventional practices to regenerative and organics systems.
Having spent their working lives understanding and working to solve wicked environmental and social problems, Nathalie Whitaker, Mike Taitoko and Shaun Hendy founded Toha to create a marketplace and digital token to accelerate regenerative practices globally, starting in Aotearoa.
Calm The Farm knows that an overwhelming majority of farmers want to be good land stewards. Farmers want to produce quality food, improve freshwater quality, increase biodiversity, improve animal well-being and improve the well-being of their families and their employees. Often, the incentives are simply not aligned.
Calm The Farm is working with dairy farmers, advisors, investors, banks and the government to provide financial products and incentives to convert farms to regenerative and regenerative organics practices.
Calm The Farm guides farmers to develop and commit to a “Pledge”, which is a digital smart contract. A farmer who undertakes a Pledge is committing to transition their farm to regenerative practices, as defined by Calm The Farm’s science-backed measurement framework, and to supply data that proves those changes have been implemented. A Pledge makes the impact of every environmental action visible, creating an investable data asset for the farmers.
A “Dairy Pledge” is designed to guide a dairy farmer through a transition, gather the data according to the measurement framework, then generate an income stream back to the Pledge owner from the reuse of packages of that data. Impact investors who want to ensure that their investment is providing a return on environmental good, as well as a financial return, can invest in Pledges through innovative financial products.
A Dairy Pledge has science-based Milestones, which must include a decrease in synthetic chemical fertilisers, an increase in grazing rotation length, a decrease in the application of synthetic chemicals, and promotion of pasture species diversity. Each Pledging farmer decides how much to change their management practices, as every farm is different.
Calm The Farm has noticed trends as their earliest cohort of Dairy farmers, based in the North Island, has moved through their Pledges:
Animal health costs trended down and markers of animal health increased.
Within the first year of transitioning to regenerative farming, the full cohort chose to reduce their synthetic fertiliser use to zero.
Soil fertility costs remained stable as the farmers switched from chemical fertilisers to biological soil amendments, but markers of milk quality increased, and animal health costs decreased by up to 60%.
The full cohort of farmers chose to reduce their chemical pesticide use to zero.
Re-grassing costs increased as the cohort seeded multispecies pastures, but their kilos of dry matter per hectare increased, and their pasture persistence is demonstrating longevity.
Some farmers chose to reduce stocking rates, and the savings in imported feed significantly outstripped the production change. Farmers experienced a drop of up to $200,000 in imported feed costs in the first year.
One farm moved to once-a-day milking, and they report a more joyful farming experience with improved profitability.
Having already made the move to eliminate synthetic fertiliser and chemical pesticides, the majority of the cohort began the process of organic certification.
“It’s early days, but we see some strong positive trends in animal wellbeing and performance, reduction in on-farm costs and resultant profitability and resilience for our farmers who are implementing regenerative practices.”
Watch as Calm the Farm share the story of four family farms in the Manawatū-Wanganui region as part of their Digging Deeper series.
OANZ is proud to have Calm The Farm as part of our membership network, supporting us as we work collectively to grow the regenerative organic movement in Aotearoa. You too can support our work by becoming a member today. Find out more HERE.
