A new private investment fund has the potential to put $100 million into small food and agriculture businesses in rural America. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the creation of the Open Prairie Rural Opportunities Fund at a White House conference on rural business. It will be the fourth Rural Business Investment Company (RBIC) created with USDA assistance since 2014 with the goal of directing private-sector capital into rural economic growth. The new fund is an offshoot of Open Prairie, a 20-year-old equity management company based in Effingham, Illinois.
The USDA said the fund will invest in companies across the food and agribusiness sector, including crop protection, agricultural production and processing, precision agriculture, and information and data management. In 2015, the agency announced conditional approval of two RBICs, Innova and Meritus Kirchner Capital. In 2014, Advantage Capital was awarded a license for the $150 million Advantage Capital Agribusiness fund.
Separately, USDA awarded $16.5 million in 14 grants for research into boosting agricultural productivity and food security in the face of pests, disease and climate change. The largest awards, both for nearly $2.4 million, went to the University of Illinois and the University of Maryland. The next round of projects through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative will focus on pollinator health and phenomics of plants and animals. A 2011 report by USDA and the National Science Foundation describes phenomics as “the use of large-scale approaches to study how genetic instructions from a single gene or the whole genome translate into the full set of phenotypic traits of an organism.”