Manifesto
Mad Capital is not your normal lender.
Mad Capital was born out of frustration with industrial and extractive agriculture, and the financial system that keeps farmers stuck in a system and way of life that doesn’t serve the health of soil and rural communities. Modern agriculture is gutting rural America. The health of the whole system is faltering, from the soil, the people and the environment.
Evidence is everywhere.
Commodity markets dehumanize food and expose farmers to the brutality of bottom-line production and international trade dynamics. Small towns are boarded up and people are leaving in droves. Small to medium sized farms are in sharp decline. Skyrocketing numbers of childhood obesity and autoimmune diseases are well known and not refuted. Rural poverty, job insecurity, food deserts, mental and physical health and subsequent health care costs are worsening in the agricultural lands and communities. COVID19 has exposed the dysfunction of industrial supply systems, which have failed in many ways to connect food grown at the farm scale to consumers in need.
We must change course and farmers must lead the way.
The rebellion is regenerative organic agriculture. Regenerative organic agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that focuses on maximizing the health of soil, people and animals. Regenerative organic agriculture takes a living systems approach to work with nature, rather than against it. Regenerative organic agriculture, in its deepest essence, is founded upon and operates from a different set of values than those that guide the industrial economy.
It manifests as a shift of values and concepts, from linearity to circularity, quantity to quality, monoculture to diversity, competition to cooperation, short to long view, extractive to regenerative, centralized to decentralized, dominion to interbeing, power to empowerment, withholding to sharing, manufactured to authentic. It inverts the industrial economy and rebalances the global biogeochemical cycles (i.e. carbon and nitrogen) by shifting the economy of extraction to the economy of giving, and in that reciprocity, nourishing ourselves through the natural outcome of healthy food as a result of investing in healthy soil.
The time is now for a regenerative revolution in agriculture.
Out of great pain, great innovation occurs. The conditions are ripe for change. A perfect storm of social, environmental and economic factors are aligned for another major revolution in agriculture. While daunting, any system can rapidly reconform with catalytic strategy and investment. We’ve only been growing corn and beans for a few decades. It’s unclear what things will look like 30 years in the future.
We need leaders like you to break the trail.
Leaders that your community can confidently follow. It’s up to farmers across the country to put a stake in the ground, break the levees, and charge forth, united in the agricultural revolution. To stop the corporatized, commoditized, dehumanized, system putting our entire civilization in jeopardy. Mad Capital was created to support farmers like you.
The question becomes, how do you take the first step?
Change happens farm-by-farm, from the ground up. Yet, how does a farmer take their first step? How does a farmer find the off-ramp into a different system without going bankrupt? How does the rebellion begin? It begins with us.
Mad Capital is working from head to heart, poetry to science, financing to markets, and soil to shelf to catalyze a revolution in regenerative and organic agriculture that is beautiful, just and inevitable.
We help you understand, clarify and activate your vision and develop conditions for success. Every farm and farmer faces a different set of obstacles. For some, a community of like-minded farmers is all that is needed to revolutionize your operation. The catalyst for others can be markets that reward beneficial stewardship of land or an integrated farm plan that brings clarity and technique to your vision. When capital is the primary barrier, there are few and insufficient solutions, so we created Mad Capital.
Mad Capital is an alternative lender for farmers.
We replace operating loans with capital that invigorates the imagination, liberates them from the industrial shackles of debt obligations (i.e. bank requirements for GMO seeds, synthetic inputs, etc.) and enables the transition to regenerative organic agriculture. We leverage our full system of change to co-create an organic transition plan with you at no added cost, open market offtake for both crops and soil carbon, and base the payback on your ability to succeed with a revenue share tailored to your individual farm. The fund is structured to ensure that the success of Mad Agriculture, partners, and the farmers are one in the same. The health of the soil and all people is one and indivisible.
Mad Capital is built upon the principles of the new story.
We put our skin-in-the-game to rehumanize finance, share risk, redistribute wealth, decentralize control and empower place based wisdom, with integrated technical assistance every step of the way. If you’re ready to use regenerative and organic agriculture to boldly create the future of healthy soil, food and communities, then Mad Capital could be right for your farm financing. If you’re ready for the adventure and reward of challenge.If you’re ready to live boldly yet humbly. If you’re ready to drive the revolution, tear down the old, and welcome the new. Mad Capital is for you.
We invite you to pursue the vision in your heart of a world that is better and more beautiful, but not yet defined. Don’t just read it. Believe it, test it, try it, live it.
We challenge you with the words of Adrienne Brown.
Can you say? ‘I am living a life I don’t regret, A life that will resonate with my ancestors, and with as many generations forward as I can imagine. I am attending to the crises of my time with my best self, I am of communities that are doing their collective best to honor our ancestors and all humans to come.’
Join us.
Work with Mad Capital, our partners and farmers by creating the future of agriculture.