Origins.coop is a platform cooperative connecting smallholder farmer networks with manufacturers, buyers, investors & project developers to fund and develop regenerative production and trade systems.

Origins.coop: Solidarity Economies in Service to Life

We are raising money to support organizational development, platform design and deployment and the onboarding process of 1000 founding farmers from the Wanakaset Symbiosis Network - a confederation of smallholder regenerative rubber farmers in the Songkhla Lake Watershed in the south of Thailand.

Leaders of the Wanakaset Symbiosis Network (WSN) meeting in Ko Yor in February 2024

Songkhla Lake Basin where the WSN communities are located and which contains 500,000 hectares (1,235,527 acres) of rubberlands which is approximately 1% of total global rubber production. Our aim is to transition the whole Songkhla watershed to regenerative agriculture production.

Origins.coop exists to:

FINANCE smallholder capacity building, farm transition and community value adding infrastructure development

SUPPORT farmer cooperative development, capacity building, farm transition and the building of bioregional processing, aggregation and logistics facilities through multi-stakeholder partnerships like the Regenerative Rubber Alliance

DEVELOP local and global markets for diverse agricultural products in multiple industries through our Origins Platform solution for origin and product exploration, price discovery and the development of forward contract offtake agreements between growers and buyers

VERIFY the regenerative outcomes produced within origin communities and value adding processes using Ethos™ insights and utilize aggregated claims instruments to channel resources to strategic priority areas where focus is required to continuously improve

CONNECT local, bioregional and global communities in-person and online to share knowledge, strategies, resources and inspiration and enable collective governance of the cooperative platform

TELL the data-backed Origin Stories that provide hope, motivation and inspiration for our members, customers and communities

The world’s two billion smallholders produce 35% of the world’s food and up to 70% in low and middle income countries. They produce the majority of key agricultural commodities like rubber, coffee and cacao but often get the skinny end of the wedge of the value they produce and have little bargaining power to change their circumstances.

Furthermore, despite the critical role smallholder's play, and their disproportionate vulnerability to the polycrisis, they often lack basic access to the capital, tools, resources and organizational support to ensure their food sovereignty, reliable livelihoods and ongoing regenerative stewardship of landscapes. Poignant evidence of this is the fact that smallholders currently receive a mere 0.8% of total global climate finance.

For the past 5 years our group of stakeholders known as the Regenerative Rubber Alliance, a collaborative effort between smallholder farmers, brands, academics, NGOs, and governmental agencies has been catalyzing the regeneration of rubber producing landscapes.

We've seen many positive changes during this time and now have our sights set on how to deepen and expand regenerative systems change by developing a structural alternative to the commodity market status quo. We believe that profound change will come about by evolving infrastructure, institutions and instruments supportive of smallholder farmer leadership, ownership and governance and by better enabling capital to flow directly to grassroots changemakers. Origins.coop, as a a farmer-owned international cooperative brokerage platform will enable confederation of smallholder farmers across geographies and jurisdictions to:

• aggregate supply and demand for agricultural goods and outcome data, and de-risk transactions for both sellers and buyers;
• increase member's bargaining power and economic resilience through long-term contractual agreements;
• enable multiple streams of revenue from diverse agricultural goods, data payments, eco-credit sales and dividends; and,
• channel investment via innovative blended finance into farm transition, capacity building and the expansion of community-owned value-adding infrastructure. Our many-to-many approach to market development connects networks of farmers with buyer groups, enabling monetization where necessary and protecting sovereignty everywhere else.

WATCH: Groundwork: Building Community Through Regenerative Rubber

*Regen Foundation is serving as the fiscal sponsor for this project, hence the regenfoundation.eth address