How Joris Timmers applied resilience thinking to agricultural finance
- Joris Timmers
- Program Director Rabo Partnerships
“What I learned about resilience gave me a new way to think about agricultural finance, and we are now testing that approach with a partner bank in Ethiopia.”
How can financial institutions support a more resilient agricultural sector? For Joris Timmers, Programme Director at Rabo Partnerships, the Lighthouse Farm Academy offered a new way to look at that question. An insight from the programme is now being tested in practice as part of a smallholder finance project in Ethiopia.
Joris Timmers works at Rabo Partnerships, where he supports financial institutions in developing countries with financing the agricultural sector. His work focuses particularly on Latin America, helping partner banks strengthen their knowledge, networks and approaches to agricultural finance.
His interest in the Lighthouse Farm Academy (LHFA) started with a question he encountered through his work: why are farmers so dependent on costly agricultural inputs?
“In different countries, I saw indigenous farmers producing high-quality coffee and cacao with very few artificial inputs,” Joris explains. “That made me wonder whether improving farmers’ livelihoods is only about increasing revenues, or whether reducing costs can be just as important.”
For smallholder farmers, he saw that expensive inputs can make it particularly difficult to build a sustainable livelihood. The subject was not yet receiving much attention within the financial institutions he worked with, which motivated him to explore it further through LHFA.
Seeing regenerative agriculture in practice
Joris chose to join the LHFA Lab in Southeast Spain, an area where water scarcity and desertification make agricultural production particularly challenging. What stood out to him was seeing regenerative agriculture side by side with more conventional approaches.
“The differences were enormous, particularly when you looked at the soil and the life within it. What fascinated me was that making an impact did not necessarily require a huge capital investment. Sometimes it was about doing things differently, or even doing less.”
Practices such as reducing tillage, using less artificial fertiliser and introducing managed grazing demonstrated how relatively fundamental changes could influence the health of the farming system. For Joris, seeing these approaches in such a challenging environment made the lessons particularly powerful.
“What fascinated me was that making an impact did not necessarily require a huge capital investment.”
Taking resilience into agricultural finance
One part of the programme has since taken on a very practical role in Joris’ work: the framework used within LHFA to think about different dimensions of resilience. Banks traditionally assess whether a farmer is likely to repay a loan based largely on historical and demographic information. But during the programme, Joris began to wonder whether indicators of resilience could also help predict future financial risk.
“That was when it clicked for me: resilience could potentially tell us something about the future risk of a farmer, while banks traditionally look mainly at information from the past.”
Together with colleagues working on credit-scoring models, Joris started exploring which resilience-related variables could be supported by reliable data and potentially integrated into a bank’s scorecard. The approach is now being tested with a partner bank in Ethiopia.
The project is still in the testing phase. The team has identified a number of variables and, following recent harvests, can start investigating whether they genuinely improve the model’s predictive value.
For Joris, the potential goes further than simply deciding whether or not to provide a loan. If certain practices make a farming business more resilient, financial institutions could potentially create incentives for farmers to adopt them, for example through different lending conditions.
“That was when it clicked for me: resilience could potentially tell us something about the future risk of a farmer, while banks traditionally look mainly at information from the past.”
Learning from different perspectives
Joris also valued the diversity within the LHFA group. Participants came from agriculture, financial institutions, NGOs and businesses elsewhere in the value chain. “That diversity was really valuable. People challenged each other, and the farmers themselves were very open about their revenues, costs and the realities of running their business.”
Those connections continued after the Lab. Joris invited fellow participants, including those leading farm labs in Ethiopia and Indonesia, to share their experiences with colleagues at Rabobank. He has since encouraged several colleagues to participate in LHFA themselves.
“That diversity was really valuable. People challenged each other, and the farmers themselves were very open about their revenues, costs and the realities of running their business.”
Who can benefit from LHFA?
For professionals in banking, Joris sees particular value for people working directly with agricultural clients and value chains, as well as those developing sustainability policies. But he believes the relevance extends beyond finance. Professionals working with agricultural supply chains, from sourcing and trading to food companies, can also benefit from understanding how different actors can contribute to more resilient farming systems.
Ultimately, Joris sees the greatest opportunity when people from different parts of a value chain learn together. “If you bring different actors in the value chain together and ask how an approach can be scaled, who needs to do what and what the costs are, I think you can create much greater impact.”