“We are working every day to make this asset class more mainstream, because we believe it is the most credible and fastest way to close the financing gap in climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and rural poverty alleviation.”
- Oliver Hanke, Chief Sustainability & Marketing Officer
12Tree’s business model is based on three pillars: asset management, project development and operations, and marketing our agriculture and forestry products.
ASSET MANAGEMENT
We use our understanding of the needs of professional investors to remove hurdles for investment and unlock scaled capital to be directed into large-scale impactful projects in regenerative agriculture.
FARM OPERATIONS
We operate projects ourselves, enabling us to guarantee zero deforestation, regenerative management practices and transparency throughout the resulting value chain.
SALES AND MARKETING
We market and sell the products produced on our farms directly - at premium prices and providing full traceability - thus eliminating the costs of intermediaries.
The synergy of these three pillars not only makes 12Treeunique in the marketplace, but it also enables us to affect real change. By allowing capital to be raised and invested at scale in regenerative agriculture projects, we are not only generating financial returns for our investors, but also measurable social and environmental returns, for climate, community and biodiversity. Our approach to sales and marketing is simple: to make sustainability pay. We create meaningful stories and decouple the products of our farms from the daily fluctuations of commodity market prices - because we decommoditize them and create a direct linkbetween origin and consumer.
We generate premiums for sustainable products and cut out middlemen which enables us to pass on higher prices to the farmers that we purchase from. This approach ensures that we provide long-term benefits for all stakeholders and lead the industry away from extractive practices. Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. Our team of experts in environment and ecology, social impact, and carbon cycles are involved in shaping the company strategy; advising our deal teams in project design; providing support for integrating sustainability into operations; and providing meaningful measurement, monitoring, climate accounting and reporting to all stakeholders - our investors, buyers, and the public.
Asset Management
Our mission is to enable capital to be raised and deployed at scale into agroforestry projects to generate financial returns for our investors, as well as social and environmental returns for people and nature, on an equal basis. We are working every day to make this asset class mainstream, as wind power has become over the last decade, because we believe this is the most credible and fastest way to bridge the funding gap in the space of climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation and reduction of poverty in rural areas.
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To achieve that we have built an interdisciplinary asset management team which translates the needs of institutional investors into a language that can be understood and implemented by local operational teams. This asset management team is composed of professionals and experts including investment specialists, lawyers, financial controllers, accountants and technical project supervisors with a forestry/agronomic background.
We are responsible for the origination and structuring of deals, always following rigorous and independent due diligence (legal, tax, financial, technical, social) and approvals processes. After an investment has been included in our portfolio, we strive to provide investors with clear and transparent operational and financial information, which is verified on a yearly basis by financial auditors and forestry/agriculture appraisers. To demonstrate our commitment to regenerative practices, we voluntary certify our projects under a standard that is selected on case by case basis (FSC, UTZ, organic, Gold standard etc.). Finally on the social front, we mandate social impact auditors that help us establish and track important impact objectives.
Farm Operation Services
We developed the ability to meet two essential operational needs of every agroforestry project:
Farm management
12Tree provides Farm Management services for projects by converting long-term, strategic business plans into yearly, monthly, and daily activities and managing the execution of these tasks.
We cover activity planning and execution, sustainability management, human resources, budget creation and control, input acquisition and management, post-harvest management, and others.
Our team consists of qualified professionals with experience in project management, agronomy, business management, and the specifics of various tree crops and forestry species.
Technical and Agronomic Services
We provide technical and agronomic services to agroforestry projects throughout Latin America and parts of Africa.
Our team consists of agronomists and specialists in the fields of nutrition management, irrigation management, phytosanitation, pruning and canopy management, harvest management and post-harvest management for cacao, GIS, and data management.
Using a develop-train-audit cycle in consulting farms, this team is a one-stop-shop for supporting farms technological and agronomic needs.
