CRF’s Immediate Need
Fund the Groundwork for SAH
CRF is seeking approximately $2.5 million to complete the early work required before the Sustainable Ag Hub can be formed, financed, and built. This is not construction capital. It is the funding needed to test, refine, document, structure, and prepare the project for later investment, public support, and implementation.
CRF’s Immediate Need
Fund the Groundwork for SAH
CRF is seeking approximately $2.5 million to complete the early work required before the Sustainable Ag Hub can be formed, financed, and built. This is not construction capital. It is groundwork capital: the funding needed to test, refine, document, structure, and prepare the project for later investment, public support, and implementation.
Building something of this scale responsibly involves proving the concept before committing to the entire project.
The work is structured in two distinct phases that have different missions, different entities, and different kinds of capital.
Phase I: Research, Development, Analysis
This is the groundwork every serious venture must complete before it can attract development capital. It is explicitly not a profit-making endeavor. Its purpose is to establish, rigorously and credibly, whether the concept is viable, and to build the platform on which physical development can proceed.
Climate Remediation Foundation will carry out Phase I as a public charity, and is seeking to raise $2.5 million to complete the groundwork project.
Phase II — Sustainable Ag Hub
Once Phase I has established the platform and proven the economics, the physical build-out proceeds under a separate, private, entity, potentially for-profit.
Phase II is expected to draw a different class of capital: investors seeking a return, rather than philanthropic grants. Ahead of full build-out, the plan anticipates project financing to complete an initial ten-acre pilot, with the full 1,000-plus-acre cooperative phased over several years.
PHASE I GROUNDWORK
Funding is needed to pursue the following activities:
- Economic and technical feasibility studies of the concept including the anaerobic digester feasibility study
- Preliminary greenhouse engineering toward a proof-of-concept pilot
- Site identification and land sourcing, ideally through easements
- Exploration of water capture, supply, and treatment
- Identification of tax incentives and grant opportunities
- Recruiting prospective cooperative members and vendors
- Establishing power and infrastructure agreements with regional and state authorities
- Partner recruitment
- Developing relationships with investment partners for long-term funding
- Business planning, permitting groundwork, branding, and go-to-market strategy
- Biogas and circular-resource feasibility
- Food-waste Circularity logistics analysis
- Cooperative legal-structure development
- Produce market and distribution analysis
- Grant-writing and foundation engagement
- Public-interest documentation and communications
- Early engineering and permitting
Deliverables and Intended Outcomes
A successful CRF groundwork campaign will produce the evidence, structure, relationships, and implementation roadmap required to launch SAH responsibly. It will NOT produce a finished greenhouse complex.
The expected deliverables from this phase are:
- SAH project plan
- A defensible cooperative structure
- Documented site and infrastructure findings
- Compiling technical and economic feasibility analysis into a strategic plan
- A grant and public-funding strategy
- A philanthropic case statement
- A partner and advisor network
- A high level format for establishing the SAH entity
- A roadmap for Phase 2 capitalization
WHY Philanthropic funding
The early work creates public-interest value before it creates private investment value.
Because Phase I delivers exactly the kind of climate benefit that mission-driven funders care about: curtailing the water depletion, soil loss, and CO2 emissions of Western field growing, it is well suited to grant and philanthropic support rather than equity investment.
A contribution to the Foundation can be structured as a tax-deductible, donor-directed grant that finances the platform without requiring any equity participation.
The public-interest harms to be explored are: water depletion, emissions, food waste, landfill methane, supply-chain fragility, runoff, and reduced food resilience.
The benefits of developing a lower-impact regional produce system accrue broadly to consumers, communities, institutions, and the environment.
Copyright 2026, Climate Remediation Foundation, Inc.