Elizabeth Teague Of Root Capital On How Farmers And The Ag Industry Are Adapting To The Disruptions Caused By Climate And World Events

Adopt regenerative agriculture practices, such as agroforestry and organic fertilizer, to build resilience: Regenerative agriculture focuses on building soil and overall environmental health to achieve resilient yields and resilient ecosystems. For instance, agroforestry, or planting trees alongside crops, can improve soil fertility, reduce erosion, protect biodiversity, and draw down carbon from the atmosphere. Similarly, organic fertilizers like compost improve soil fertility, structure, and water retention, which boosts farm yields and resilience to shocks like drought.

The war in Ukraine, the ongoing pandemic, and catastrophic climate events have contributed to a global food crisis. Farmers and Ag Industry workers are being challenged to respond and adapt to these disruptions. In this interview series, we’re speaking with leaders in the farming and Ag industries who can shed light on how they’re navigating these challenges and adapting to the disruptions caused by climate and world events. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Teague.

Elizabeth Teague (she/her/hers), Senior Director of Climate Resilience at Root Capital, is an expert working at the intersection of climate change, impact investing, and global development. At Root Capital — a nonprofit that invests in small and growing agricultural enterprises to transform rural communities — Elizabeth leads the organization’s strategy to advance urgent climate action in frontline communities. As Senior Director, she collaborates with Root Capital staff and partners around the world, including farmer-allied businesses, multilateral organizations, corporations, and funders. Under her leadership, Root Capital deployed $239 million in climate-aligned financing from 2020–2023 and reached more than 472,000 farmers and employees.

She has been featured at conferences and events hosted by industry leaders, including the Global Coffee Platform, MIT’s Climate & Sustainability Consortium, the Specialty Coffee Association, CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, and The Chain Collaborative.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I started hearing more about sustainable agriculture during college. I wanted to understand what sustainability meant on the ground, so I worked for a year with a regenerative agricultural community in Japan that trains rural leaders from across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Working and living with people from all over the world, I had the opportunity to hear about challenges and opportunities facing many different rural communities, from Brazil to Kenya to Myanmar and many places in between. A common thread was lack of resources to invest in sustainable practices. So after Japan, I wanted to work with an organization that invests in local communities to improve livelihoods while conserving the environment. I found Root Capital and was inspired by the organization’s model of partnering with local agricultural businesses, providing them with the capital and training needed to drive their vision of impact in their communities. I’ve been here ever since (13 years!).

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

The most interesting and most enlightening moments also involve connecting with our partners, the agricultural businesses and farmers we work with in Africa, Indonesia, and Latin America. The opportunity to see our partners’ landscape, to walk the fields with entrepreneurs or farmers and hear about the challenges and opportunities they’re seeing, always gives me a new perspective and motivation for the work we’re doing together. Recently, for example, we worked with several coffee cooperatives to understand their efforts to combat climate change by using regenerative, agroforestry practices. Working with a number of partners, we calculated their carbon footprint and found that most farmers are carbon negative, meaning they’re actually pulling down carbon from the atmosphere. Farmers also shared how they achieve these incredible results. It’s always a privilege to learn from farmers with such deep knowledge of their land and environment.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Solution-oriented mindset. Addressing rural poverty, building sustainable food systems, solving climate change — these are huge, thorny challenges without a clear roadmap for success. If we’re serious about solving these problems, we have to go out and create our own solutions. It can be daunting to get started, so I’ve found it helpful to break the problem down into manageable “mini-problems.” For example, when designing Root Capital’s climate lending approach, we didn’t try to solve for our global portfolio all at once — we started with particular regions and crops.
2. Openness to and willingness to give feedback. Very early in my career, I attended an external presentation given by a senior leader at my organization. After the presentation, this leader asked me for constructive feedback on his performance. I loved that commitment to personal growth, and I’ve tried to take that spirit forward in my own work — regularly asking for feedback from colleagues, and offering feedback in turn, on things large and small. I’ve found that if you make feedback part of the normal day-to-day, you learn so much from your colleagues, and you find the opportunities for coaching that make management so rewarding.
3. Curiosity. One of things I love most about my work is that I’m learning new things all the time. And I think that a spirit of inquiry is a prerequisite of working in such a rapidly-evolving landscape. Beyond the usual desk research, going to conferences, etc., I’ve found it helpful to build a network of colleagues to learn from and with — especially colleagues with a different perspective on our work, perhaps because they work on a different team or from a different location.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” Working with a mission-driven organization, it’s important to remain laser focused on the big, messy problems we’re trying to solve and recognize that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution — and even that yesterday’s solution might not be the answer tomorrow. Our approach needs to keep evolving. Again, I think this goes back to being open to learning and challenging one’s assumptions. This sentiment has helped us adapt Root Capital’s work over the last decade to respond to the ever-changing, accelerating climate crisis.

Can you share something about your work that makes you most proud? Is there a particular story or incident that you found most uplifting?

I feel proud and privileged to partner with local businesses doing all they can to improve their communities. There are so many inspiring stories: women entrepreneurs starting a coffee cooperative in the Democratic Republic of Congo to provide people displaced by conflict with a source of income; coffee farmers in Peru planting and conserving shade trees on their farms to provide habitat for endangered birds and mitigate climate change; macadamia businesses in Kenya helping farmers access mango and avocado seedlings to diversify their farms and build resilience. These partners give us hope for the future.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about ‘How Farmers and the Ag Industry Are Adapting to the Disruptions Caused by Climate and World Events’. This might be intuitive to you but it will be helpful to expressly spell this out. Can you share with our readers a few examples of why and how climate change is causing disruptions to agriculture?

Climate change is an existential threat to farmers, especially small farmers in low-income countries where one bad harvest can be catastrophic to a family’s livelihood. Farmers depend on predictable temperatures, rains, and good soil health — all of which are negatively impacted by the climate crisis. There are, of course, extreme weather events, such as droughts in Kenya and catastrophic rains leading to landslides in Peru. These types of events are increasing in both frequency and intensity, threatening farmland. Then there are longer-term climate conditions that are changing, like altered rainfall patterns or higher temperatures, which can hamper crop growth and water availability, leading to reduced agricultural productivity. Maize crop yields may decrease to 24% as early as 2030 because of higher temperatures that impact plant growth. All of these effects, together, are putting the incomes of smallholder farmers at risk.

What about world events? Can you share with our readers a few examples of why and how world events and geopolitical choices cause causing disruptions to agriculture?

Two recent examples are the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine, which both caused huge disruptions to the agricultural sector. During the early days of the pandemic, the ability of farmers and agricultural enterprises to move and sell goods was severely restricted — in some countries, for example, lockdowns meant farmers couldn’t leave their town to buy inputs or sell their product. Today, the lingering impacts of the pandemic can be seen in difficulties securing shipping containers for export and of course ongoing inflation. One of the biggest issues has been a spike in fertilizer prices. High fertilizer prices can significantly impact smallholder farmers, who may not have the resources to pay more for these important inputs. When fertilizer prices rise, farmers face increased production costs, which can lead to reduced fertilizer application and therefore lower yields. This can have long-term consequences for food security and farmers’ livelihoods.

Based on your experience and research, can you please share your “5 Things Farmers and Ag Industry Workers Can Do to Adapt to the Disruptions Caused by Climate and World Events”?

1. Band together for enhanced access to resources, financing, and markets: Joining a cooperative or other agricultural enterprises can provide small-scale farmers with increased access to resources and support systems, as well as global markets in which to sell their crops. Individual farmers have limited power and resources; together, they can benefit from shared knowledge, technology, and financial assistance to overcome climate change and other disruptions. For example, 19 farmers in Honduras came together to form the RAOS cooperative in 1997 and were able to export 5,000 pounds of coffee to a buyer in Germany. Since then, they’ve grown to 300 farming families exporting 4.5 million pounds of coffee annually — something they could never accomplish as individuals. Being part of an enterprise like RAOS also gives farmers greater access to the other recommendations on this list.
2. Adopt regenerative agriculture practices, such as agroforestry and organic fertilizer, to build resilience: Regenerative agriculture focuses on building soil and overall environmental health to achieve resilient yields and resilient ecosystems. For instance, agroforestry, or planting trees alongside crops, can improve soil fertility, reduce erosion, protect biodiversity, and draw down carbon from the atmosphere. Similarly, organic fertilizers like compost improve soil fertility, structure, and water retention, which boosts farm yields and resilience to shocks like drought.
3. Invest in climate-smart infrastructure, such as solar panels: Investing in climate-smart infrastructure can help farmers and agricultural enterprises adapt to disruptions. Installing solar panels on farms can provide a renewable source of energy for activities like irrigation, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and lower electricity costs. This shift to clean energy not only helps reduce carbon emissions but also increases the long-term sustainability and resilience of the farm operation. For example, in many rural communities in the Global South, renewable energy can be more reliable than fossil fuel energy. By investing in solar panels, farmers can achieve energy leap-frogging, skipping the dependence on fossil fuel-based energy and directly adopting renewable energy sources.
4. Lean on digital technology to make informed decisions: Digital applications, such as the Cool Farm Tool, can help farmers identify priorities for climate action. In a pilot project by Root Capital and partners, we used the Cool Farm Tool to collect, analyze, and measure greenhouse gas emissions on smallholder coffee farms. We found that best-performing farmers operate at carbon negative, meaning they remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit — an incredible result compared to other agricultural sectors. Looking ahead, farmers, cooperatives, and even larger coffee companies could use the Cool Farm tool to identify key drivers of emissions to reduce their carbon footprints. Digital technology has the potential to make messy, technical topics more accessible and more actionable, as long as the tools are designed with farmers in mind and made accessible to them.
5. Advocate for more climate finance for the agricultural sector: Farmers bear the brunt of extreme weather and climate change impacts, yet the sector receives 2.5% of global climate financing. Agricultural industry leaders as well as investors should advocate for increased funding for climate-smart agriculture and sustainable rural development, especially for communities highly vulnerable to climate shocks. Over the last few years, Root Capital has provided $239 million in climate finance to help rural communities invest in urgent climate action — but we’re just one lender. We need a concerted push by investors to close the climate financing gap.

How has technology played a role in helping farmers and the Ag Industry adapt to the disruptions caused by climate and world events? Can you share a few examples?

Technology has played a crucial role in helping farmers and the agricultural industry adapt to climate and world disruptions. Precision agriculture technologies, including sensors, drones, and remote sensing, have gained prominence in optimizing practices in the Global North. But it’s important to acknowledge that many smallholder farmers require different technologies, better tailored to their contexts. Organizations like Sistema.bio and SunCulture are leading the way by providing solutions right-sized for smallholder farmers, including access to affordable clean energy, irrigation, and organic fertilizer.

It’s also important to remember that new technology is not always the answer — technology won’t solve for poor agronomic practices or lack of access to basic agricultural inputs. That’s why Root Capital works with agricultural businesses to improve their core agronomic training for farmers, so farmers can adopt better farming practices to boost their productivity and build resilience to climate disruptions.

With greater attention being placed on the importance of the farming and Ag industries, as well as technological advancements, what do you predict will be different about the farming and Ag sectors over the next ten years?

One notable shift will be the integration of climate action into all aspects of agriculture, from farm to market. Recognizing agriculture as a critical climate solution, stakeholders will go beyond focusing solely on crop productivity and quality. They will consider decarbonization and climate adaptation as key factors. Forward-thinking actors will also prioritize biodiversity and other environmental benefits, as they work to build regenerative food systems.

To drive this transformation, it is crucial that these trends translate into increased resources for smallholder farmers, who manage a substantial portion of the world’s farmland yet receive next-to-nothing of global climate finance. In the build-up to COP 28, there’s a global discussion about the need to move from big finance commitments to money actually in the hands of farmers. We hope this decade truly becomes a “decade of action” for agricultural communities, starting with resourcing local communities to realize their vision for resilient, sustainable food systems.

The idea of farming has a very romantic and idyllic character to it, especially to some people living in a busy cosmopolitan context. Do you think now would be a good time for younger people with no farming history to get involved in the farming industry? Can you explain what you mean?

While agriculture can be a risky and volatile sector, there are ways for young people to forge a successful career in this industry. These days, the sector is increasingly embracing technology and innovation to address climate risks — and this presents a unique opportunity for young people to secure gainful employment while making a meaningful impact. In particular, young people can leverage technology and training skills in technical assistance jobs that help farmers adapt to climate risks. For example, Root Capital uses Talent Partnerships to place young graduates into internships with small and growing agricultural enterprises, including on the agronomic assistance teams.

Where should a young person start if they would like to “get into” farming?

If a young person is interested in getting into farming, their best bet is to engage with local agricultural enterprises and cooperatives. These enterprises provide farmers with inputs, training, and even financial support to help grow their farming operations. Root Capital’s Next-Generation Jobs initiative focuses on engaging young people in the agricultural sector. Today’s global youth population is the largest in history, and 88% of them live in developing countries. At the same time, the average coffee farmer is over 50 years old. That’s why we’re investing in creating employment pathways for rural youth, especially in local agricultural businesses that need a strong talent pool.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Sylvia Earle, the marine biologist and explorer. I spend a lot of my free time sailing with my family, and I’d love to hear her stories of ocean exploration.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best way to stay informed on Root Capital’s work is to subscribe to our monthly newsletter here. You can also follow us on social media; we have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.