Farmer-Led ChANge.

At Momentum Ag, we use a Participatory Action Research framework to help farmers implement and optimize climate-smart innovations, and promote adoption within their communities.

We remove the financial risk, provide technical support, create farmer-to-farmer learning networks, and trust farmers to develop the systems we need to develop truly sustainable agriculture.

Biological diversity is the basis of a healthy farm system, and a diversity of farms and farmers is the basis of a healthy agricultural system. 

Our farmers grow row crops, small grains, and vegetables on three or three thousand acres. We strive to overrepresent farmers in historically underserved groups — military veterans, low-income producers, beginning farmers, female and non-binary growers. In particular, because of historical and contemporary expropriation and exclusion, less than 5% of U.S. farmers identify as BIPOC. We work to ensure that 10% of our farmer-partners are non-white. In some cases, historically underserved farmers require additional financial and/or technical assistance to be successful and we fundraise earmarked dollars for this purpose.

Our phase I and II target area is the humid, temperate rectangle stretching from Minnesota to Missouri and across to the Atlantic. This region shares critical climatic and cropping similarities, so farmers can experiment with similar techniques and strategies. Our target region has 180,000 commercial farms – about half of the U.S. total – and encompasses much of the most productive and intensively managed farmland in the U.S. Managing these farms for increased carbon sequestration and biodiversity, and decreased air and water pollution promises an outsized environmental impact.

180,000 farms is a relatively small target market with a huge potential to impact emissions, pollution, and biodiversity. Our plan is to fund trials at 1% of these farms. 1% of farmers participating in the development of sustainable systems is enough to start the farmer-to-farmer adoption flywheel.