Steve Agi raised something important this morning about the gap between impact investment intent and on-the-ground data quality.
Here's what we see from the systems side:
Impact investors are increasingly sophisticated about what they want to measure. The problem isn't the metrics — it's the verification layer.
Most ag-impact investments are still relying on:
→ Self-reported farmer data
→ Aggregated regional proxies
→ Annual audit snapshots
None of these give you the signal you need to make real-time portfolio decisions.
The farms that are actually performing — on yield, on soil health, on carbon sequestration — often can't prove it in a format that moves capital.
That's not a farming problem. It's a coordination architecture problem.
The question we keep coming back to: what does a verification layer actually look like when it's built for the farm gate, not the fund manager's spreadsheet?
Curious what others in the impact investment space are seeing.