A producer-led investment design process for Western Canada’s regenerative beef value chain
Regenerative agriculture cannot scale on changes in farming practice alone. Producers also need viable markets, processing capacity, land access, and financial tools that make regeneration economically possible.
In Western Canada’s regenerative beef value chain, those gaps are increasingly visible. Aggregators struggle to grow because of processing bottlenecks. Productive pasture changes hands faster than young ranchers and conservation-minded buyers can respond. Thin margins make it difficult to finance the infrastructure and business investments that could strengthen the value chain.
Learning From the Land Up begins by understanding these constraints from the people who know the system from the inside. Their experience shapes where the team looks for opportunities and, ultimately, which financial tools are worth developing.
Why This Work
Western Canada’s alternative beef supply chain is under pressure. Alberta has lost more than a third of its provincial abattoirs since 2015, and succession challenges threaten some of those that remain. Productive pasture is converting to row crops faster than farmers, conservation groups, and lenders can respond. Record cattle prices are drawing supply toward conventional packers, even as demand for regeneratively raised beef continues to grow.
These pressures reach well beyond individual farms. Producers operate within markets and financial systems that can make regenerative practices hard to sustain, no matter how committed they are. Capital has entered the sector without resolving many of these underlying constraints.
Learning From the Land Up focuses on the surrounding infrastructure, looking for places where better-designed capital could change the system's economics.
How It Works
The work begins with producers and follows the value chain outward. Ranchers help the research team understand the businesses and relationships their livelihoods depend on, revealing where value is created and lost and where constraints are holding back the wider system.
Those findings become the basis for investment design. Supply chain entrepreneurs participate directly in working groups, bringing the economics of their businesses and their experience using capital into the process.
TIFS used a similar approach in the U.S. Midwest, which surfaced DiversiFund, a systems-level investment platform. The research also exposed shortcomings in how agricultural risk is understood and financed, contributing to RALIC’s work to rethink crop insurance for regenerative farmers.
Canadian Leadership
Learning From the Land Up was conceived and initiated in Canada. Erin Crampton and Sacha Investments began the work in Alberta three years ago. Two years into the process, the Canadian team invited TIFS to join as a strategic partner.
The partnership grew from an approach both teams had reached through their own work: financial tools are more useful when they are grounded in a close understanding of the food systems they are intended to serve.
The Canadian team brings regional relationships, knowledge, and leadership. TIFS contributes experience translating systems analysis into financial innovation, convenes the investment co-design working groups, and provides funding for that stage of the work.
This connects the Canadian initiative to TIFS’ wider work on the financial conditions that shape regenerative food systems. Across its initiatives, TIFS works on barriers ranging from investment and enterprise finance to insurance and risk, developing approaches that respond to the particular economics of each place and sector.
From Listening to Investment
The first phase in Alberta included three months of workshops and in-depth interviews across the beef value chain. The research surfaced three areas where capital could play a meaningful role.
Aggregators. These businesses connect producers to markets and manage much of the complexity between them, yet often lack the capital and infrastructure needed to grow.
An Evergreen Land Fund. Productive pasture is selling faster than farmers, conservation groups, and lenders can respond. A revolving fund could create more time and flexibility to keep land in production and accessible to the people prepared to steward it.
Income-Generating Investments. Low farm margins make conventional financing difficult to carry. Opportunities to improve those margins exist, but many require upfront investment structured around the sector's economics.
These ideas will now be tested and shaped with the people who would use them.
The Role of Capital
The early stages of this work require business development capital to support research, analysis, convening, and design before an investable product exists.
The instruments that emerge will need to generate returns for investors while improving the economics for the producers and businesses using them. Catalytic and philanthropic capital can support the work required to develop and test those ideas; investment capital can then finance viable solutions.
This is an important part of TIFS’ role: creating the conditions for promising ideas to move from an identified systems problem to an investable solution.
Where We Are Now
Field research is now underway in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, where provincial partner organizations are convening producers and others across their supply chains.
At the same time, the Learning From the Land Up team and TIFS are bringing together working groups around the three opportunities identified in Alberta. Both streams of work will come together at in-person events in November 2026 in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Brandon, Manitoba.
Looking Ahead
What emerges from Learning From the Land Up will be shaped by the realities of Western Canada’s beef value chain, while adding to a wider body of TIFS work on the financial infrastructure needed for regenerative food systems.
The value of that work extends beyond any single financial product. It builds a better understanding of where finance can remove barriers, strengthen businesses, and help regenerative food systems become economically durable.
The Team
Erin Crampton — Program architect and lead
erin.crampton@tifsinitiative.org
Rex Raimond, TIFS — Investment co-design and methodology
rraimond@tifsinitiative.org
Kira Gerwing, Sacha Investments — Investor partner
kgerwing@sachainvestments.com