Our Story
It started with a question
“WHAT WOULD A NON-PROFIT FARM LOOK LIKE?”
When farms are managed as for-profit businesses, they are bound by their articles of incorporation to maximize the return of profit to their shareholders. Implicit in this is a lack of obligation to anyone else, namely future owners of the land and communities living downstream. When these stakeholders are not considered in on-farm decisions, they often end up bearing the cost of the farm's profit.
2013: Odd's Creek Farm was founded with 65-acres and a dream to do things differently. We followed best practices for buffer strips, terracing, cover crops, organic sources of fertilizer, and low or no-till. All of this to show that a profit could be made without pushing the land to its limits.
2016: We took it a step further when Odd's Creek Farm organized as a 501(c)3 non-profit for the charitable, educational, and scientific purposes of furthering sustainable stewardship of farmland. We created an online presence and began a blog to publish our ideas and experiences. Through this, we met a number of other organizations working in the space and continued to refine our own ideas on sustainable agriculture. What emerged was a back-to-roots realization that Odd's Creek Farm was conceived by asking an economic question, and the best work we can do to support the community is search for answers in economics.
"WHAT ARE THE ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE?"
Agriculture can be complex, just ask any farmer. Developing solutions that make agriculture sustainable, capable of feeding a growing population on less land without compromising the future growing capacity of that land, requires a transdisciplinary approach. These solutions get to the heart of how we as a society value scarce natural resources.
2018: We took one more step in the pursuit of these solutions. We're incorporating approaches from agriculture, water resources engineering, and economics to develop incentive structures that encourage long-term decision making and create markets that express the societal value of natural resources.
Evolving beyond the physical farm, Odd's Creek Farm is now Odd's Creek, an institution developing innovative market-based solutions for natural resource management in agriculture and water.
To do this, we've introduced the concept of Environmental Arbitrage, an approach that explores the value of natural resources in existing and potential markets with the goal of effecting price convergence in the underlying environmental assets. We think very creatively about potential markets to reveal the value of both the assets and actions that would harm them.