It's not every day that a venture-backed agriculture startup follows a $10 million Series A with something even bigger—and decidedly less conventional. But then again, Propagate Group isn't chasing the typical Silicon Valley playbook.
In December 2024, the agroforestry platform announced a $24,634,689 award from the USDA's Regional Conservation Partnership Program, dwarfing the venture round it had closed two years earlier. The shift speaks to a quiet but significant evolution in climate-smart agriculture: sometimes the real money isn't on Sand Hill Road. It's in Washington.
For Propagate, the federal backing has accelerated growth in ways that venture capital alone might not have managed. When the company closed its Series A in November 2022—led by Belgium's The Nest, with participation from AgFunder, TELUS Pollinator Fund for Good, and several climate-focused investors—it was advising on 20,000 acres and roughly 760,000 trees and shrubs. Direct management covered just 600 commercial acres.
Today, those figures have expanded considerably, though exact totals shift as new projects come online. The company now supports north of 55,000 acres through its Overyield software platform, with more than 3 million trees and shrubs in the planning pipeline. Active management has grown to over 2,400 commercial acres, spread across operational hubs in New York, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. All told, Propagate claims to have planted over 200,000 trees in the last five years—modest by reforestation standards, perhaps, but a proof point for a business model still finding its footing.
Blending Public Dollars with Private Ambition
The RCPP award positions Propagate as the lead partner in a multi-state consortium targeting agroforestry and reforestation across the Mississippi River Basin. The project spans Ohio, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, pulling in partners that range from Virginia Tech and Rodale Institute to Living Carbon and a handful of regional nurseries and farm operations.
It's not Propagate's first federal dance. The company is also a key partner in The Nature Conservancy's $60 million Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, unveiled in September 2022. That five-year effort aims to transform 30,000 acres across 38 states and Hawaii, with backing from corporate heavyweights like Cargill, Danone, Applegate, and General Mills.
CEO Ethan Steinberg framed the challenge back at the Series A: "design, implementation, and financing" were the three barriers blocking broader agroforestry adoption. Propagate's pitch addresses each in turn—Overyield software for planning and economics, Propagate Farm Services for on-the-ground implementation, and financing programs designed to help farmers thread the needle between private capital and USDA incentive structures.
The Overyield platform has generated more than 2,500 farm plans covering some 500,000 acres of tree-planting projects across four continents, according to the company. The tool layers geospatial mapping, soil analysis, crop suitability modeling, and 30-year economic projections into a single interface. Whether farmers find those projections compelling—or even believable—remains an open question in an industry where decade-long payback periods are a hard sell.
Proof Points and Partnerships
Propagate has pursued a partnership strategy that extends well beyond fundraising announcements. Earlier this year, the company secured an exclusive U.S. license for Silvanus Forestry's Turbo Obelisk black locust varieties, a fast-growing timber species that fits neatly into agroforestry systems. A year prior, in January 2024, it partnered with Rodale Institute to build agroforestry education and demonstration sites at Rodale's Pennsylvania research facilities.
The company also operates four farms totaling 580 acres under direct management: Jones Farm in Ohio, Tate Farm in Tennessee, Home Farm in Kentucky, and Ramble On in New York. These function as both commercial operations and living proof—or at least, aspirational proof—that the economics of tree-crop integration can pencil out.
Propagate was founded in 2017 as a Public Benefit Corporation by Steinberg, COO Jeremy Kaufman, and Chief Research Officer/CIO Harrison Greene. A $1.5 million seed round in May 2020, led by Neglected Climate Opportunities (backed by the Grantham Environmental Trust), got the operation off the ground.
The Broader Bet on Federal Climate Capital
The convergence of venture funding and federal climate programs may signal something larger—a recalibration of how regenerative agriculture technologies reach commercial scale. The USDA's Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program alone represents more than $3 billion in investment across roughly 140 projects nationwide, with agroforestry among the priority practices. That's real money, and it's flowing with fewer strings attached than a typical institutional venture round.
For Propagate, the immediate path forward centers on deploying the RCPP award across the Mississippi River Basin and continuing to build out both its software user base and directly managed acreage. The company has long cited a figure—158 million U.S. acres suitable for tree crops—that frames the long-term opportunity. That number, from its 2022 press materials, is vast enough to sound aspirational. Or fantastical, depending on your outlook.
Whether that potential translates to widespread farmer adoption is the open question that hangs over every climate-smart agriculture venture. Propagate's approach—stacking venture capital, federal awards, and private project finance into a hybrid model—suggests one possible answer: make the economics work first, then let the trees follow.
That's the theory, anyway. The next few years will reveal whether it holds up in the field.
