Land Core believes soil is our common ground. This informs our pragmatic, non-partisan approach to soil health policy, elevating the voices of farmers, and building broad coalitions of support to put soil health at the center of a resilient food and agriculture system.

Much like a think tank, we listen deeply and distill issues to develop actionable solutions, and serve as on-the-ground advocates and educators.

By selecting our moments carefully, Land Core has been able to have an outsized impact on the national soil health conversation. From the annual Appropriations cycle to the every five-year Farm Bill, we work closely with Congress and USDA to develop and implement sound policies that help our producers stay profitable, productive and resilient. 

We also advise coalitions and other organizations on how to engage effectively in federal soil health policy.

Policy Wins

FY20 Appropriations 

Built a broad coalition and passed report language in the House & Senate to establish national protocols for soil health verification at USDA-NRCS. Learn more →

Soil Health Demo Trials

Helped pass the Soil Heath Demonstration Trials in the 2018 Farm Bill and secured $50M in funding for the program. Learn more →

Building a Predictive Model of Risk

Land Core is proud to share our project to build an actuarially-sound, predictive model of the risk-mitigating benefits of soil health practices, designed as a tool to inform lenders and insurers.

Although there is a general understanding that healthy soils can mitigate risk in agriculture (by increasing resilience to flooding and drought, etc.), institutions that price risk, such as banks and insurers, do not yet have a clear and effective way to incorporate these benefits into their risk pricing today.

We have convened a remarkable, cross-sector working group, to build a model that can generate a risk score for individual farms or ranches, such that actuarially-appropriate pricing can be developed. With that information, farmers and ranchers with a plan to implement soil health practices can receive meaningful economic benefits, such as discounted insurance premiums or lower rate loans.

The Land Core Risk Model will be:

• A pragmatic decision-making tool to inform agricultural finance and insurance

• Actuarially sound

• Able to assign a risk score based on an individual producer’s soil health practices

• Piloted at regional scale in the U.S. midwest

Crop Rotation Reduces Revenue Risk

Read this summary of our recent findings showing that a two-crop to a three-crop rotation consistently maintained or modestly improved mean corn revenue across farm sizes and the majority of counties studied, while also reducing farmers' vulnerability during periods of yield losses, whether they are cushioned by negative price-yield correlation, or whether they coincide with price weakness. 

In agriculture, financial survival depends not simply on harvest size, but on revenue: what a field produces, multiplied by what the market will actually pay for it. These two forces do not move independently, and in most Midwest counties, when local harvests are poor and supply tightens, prices tend to rise, offering farmers a partial natural cushion. Even so, commodity price swings contribute roughly three to four times more uncertainty to farm revenue than yield variability does, meaning that market risk, not weather, is the dominant threat to a farm's bottom line. 

This study evaluates farm revenue risk from two complementary perspectives: the individual farmer, whose exposure is shaped by local grain prices and their own fields' productivity, and the farm lender or insurer, who must account for variability across an entire county. Against that backdrop, the central question is whether the agronomic benefits of diversified crop rotations translate into a meaningful financial benefit, meaningful financial risk reduction, and/or no harm to the bottom line, once the scale of price uncertainty is fully accounted for. Our findings indicate that they do.

Crop Rotation Reduces Yield Risk

Check out this summary of our recent findings demonstrating how soil health practices, particularly crop diversification, affect corn yields under varying climate conditions across 5 Midwestern states.

Using Bayesian hierarchical models, our research quantifies the risk-mitigating effects of soil health land management practices, showing that increased crop rotational complexity reduces risks related to both yield and revenue for farmers. The analysis integrates economic modeling to account for commodity price volatility, revealing that soil health practices help farmers reduce downside risks while capturing more value from ecosystem services.

These findings demonstrate that crop diversification consistently reduces yield risk for the vast majority of Midwest farmers across diverse weather conditions and geographic regions. The modeling framework provides critical evidence that soil health practices deliver measurable risk-mitigation benefits without sacrificing crop performance, offering valuable insights for farmers, insurers, and policymakers working to build more resilient agricultural systems.

Check Out Our Beta Tool!

Check out the first version of our interactive, online Soil Health Risk Model Tool, developed in partnership with the Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment. See how diversified crop rotations impact corn yields in Illinois under dry conditions.

In the News

AgFunder News: Should ag lenders and crop insurers offer ‘good soil discounts’ to farmers? Land Core develops ‘actuarially sound model’ to make it possible

August 4, 2023

“Insurers offer discounts for avoiding smoking and good driving because these practices are proven to mitigate risk and save them money. So should insurers and agricultural lenders offer farmers that look after their soil a ‘good soil discount’?

While it’s generally understood that cover cropping, reduced tillage, and crop rotations benefit soil, these practices are by no means ubiquitous, not least because there are high upfront costs, the benefits don’t come overnight, and there are no immediate financial incentives, says soil health nonprofit Land Core.

Insurers and lenders, meanwhile, do not currently offer discounts for farmers engaging in such practices because their specific impacts at the field level, especially on crop yields, have not been quantified, it says. Until now.”

Announcements

Risk Model Project Team

The Land Core Risk Model is being developed by a cross-sector, multi-disciplinary team, including agroecologists, statisticians, economists, and farmers.

Join Us

We’re seeking partners representing lending, investment and insurance to help inform model development. Partners also have the opportunity to develop and pilot incentives for producers.

Outcomes-Integrated Land Lease Program

Land Core is creating the first scalable, outcomes-verified land lease platform, to bring together landowners, producers and funding partners, to radically advance soil health adoption in America.

This early-stage initiative welcomes partners and funders to pilot the lease and build out the web platform.

Land Core is honored to participate in The Terraton Challenge and be selected by Indigo Ag as the top-ranking finalist in their “Reward” track.