RALIC

The Resilience in Agriculture Lending & Insurance Coalition (RALIC) is a multi-year program led by TIFS to transform how agricultural risk is measured, financed, and scaled. It brings together lenders, insurers, data providers, and producer coalitions to design financial systems that recognize and reward resilience.

At the heart of RALIC is a simple insight: today’s risk models are backward-looking. They rely on outdated data that fail to capture the proven benefits of soil health, biodiversity, and regenerative practices. RALIC is working to change that—building the data, risk frameworks, and financial tools that enable farmers to access fairer credit and insurance.

Through partnerships with state agencies, insurers, and producer networks, the coalition is equipping leaders, institutions and intermediaries to bridge capital and markets for agricultural system transformation.

RALIC is:

  • Developing new actuarial data that quantifies risk reduction from soil-centered farming;
  • Creating farmer-pooled captive insurance models that provide fair coverage during transition; and
  • Aligning lending and policy systems to reflect the true value of resilience

RALIC works with:

  • Farm facing crop insurance providers
  • Leading NGOs and conservation non-profits
  • State-level agriculture departments and conservation districts
  • Academic institutions working on soil health metrics and ecosystem service research
  • Commodity marketing agencies, including those helping their members improve their carbon intensity scoring

By addressing the Missing Middle of data and finance infrastructure, RALIC is creating the conditions for regenerative agriculture to move up the market maturity curve—from early innovation to recognized market practice.

Michigan Pilot: NextGen Crop Insurance

NextGen Crop Insurance is made possible by the following coalition partners, each contributing a critical piece of the model:

Grounded in findings from TIFS' systems review across the U.S. Midwest, crop insurance emerged as one of the clearest levers for closing the Missing Middle in agriculture. Farmers told us directly, and a survey of Iowa farmers confirmed it: nearly half said having sufficient crop insurance makes it easier to adopt practices like cover crops and no-till.

That insight is now on the ground in Michigan's Thumb region, through NextGen Crop Insurance, RALIC's first-of-its-kind soil-focused crop insurance pilot, made possible by a $480,900 grant from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD). Rather than pricing risk on a decade of historical yield data alone, NextGen prices coverage for corn and soybean growers in Huron, Saginaw, Sanilac, and Tuscola counties based on the measurable, quantifiable risk reduction that comes from cover crops, crop rotation, and reduced tillage, a difference in risk that mirrors what health insurers see between smokers and non-smokers.

The result: participating farmers have the potential for lower premiums that reflect their reduced risk profile, while keeping their existing federal crop insurance and local insurance agent, and gaining more control over how their coverage is designed and priced. Farmers become eligible for a dividend after four years of continuous enrollment, turning what's traditionally a fixed cost into a source of long-term value.

Farmers who are interested in the new insurance model can visit the NextGen Crop Insurance web page for more information →

Michigan is a proof point, not the finish line. NextGen Crop Insurance was built to be replicable: as the pilot generates real actuarial data, RALIC intends to extend the model to new states and crops, moving soil-centered insurance from early pilot to standard market practice.

"This pilot is the first real test of pricing that reflects what's actually happening in the soil, and it's the blueprint for how insurers, lenders, and investors will price risk across financial services in the future."
 — Tina Owens, Founder and Leader of RALIC

RALIC is one part of a broader portfolio TIFS is building to close the Missing Middle, alongside initiatives like DiversiFund and RPI. Together, this work reflects TIFS' two-pillar strategy: strengthening the resilience of farmers and their communities from the ground up, while helping institutional investors deploy capital to regenerative agriculture from the top down. RALIC's captive insurance model does both at once, giving farmers a steadier path through transition while generating the actuarial data investors need to price and fund regenerative outcomes at scale.

RALIC is helping build the financial infrastructure needed to scale regenerative agriculture.

Read our RALIC white paper →

RALIC is led by Tina Owens, Regenerative Agriculture Systems and Investment at TIFS. To learn more about RALIC or explore partnership opportunities, contact Tina directly at tina.owens@tifsinitiative.org.

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