About the Foundation
Human freedom and flourishing depend on a community’s ability to provide for itself from a healthy and regenerating landscape. The Food Freedom Foundation exists to give regenerative agriculture hubs around the world the permanent capital they need to secure their ecological stewardship and develop sovereign food systems for the long term.
By redesigning food system financing on hard, sovereign money, the foundation aims to realign financial incentives with the low-time-preference logic of biological regeneration. Healthy land is built across decades and generations — the capital that supports it should work on the same terms.
The hubs the foundation serves are practicing Holistic Management, a systems-based approach to land stewardship developed by Allan Savory and the Savory Institute. These hubs are centers of practice, education, and community in the Savory Institute’s global network of holistically-managed landscapes— and they are where the future of food is being built. Our innovative grant model makes their permanent funding possible.
Jesse S. McDougall, Founder
Jesse S. McDougall is a regenerative farmer, open-source software advocate, published technology author, and student of Bitcoin and hard money economics. Since 2012, Jesse and his wife Cally have been stewarding Studio Hill, their family’s fifth-generation Vermont farm, where they operate as a Savory Institute Hub and education center. Jesse holds accreditation as a Savory Institute Holistic Management Field Professional, has authored regenerative agriculture legislation, testified before Vermont’s legislative agriculture committees, and taught ecosystem restoration at Bennington College.
Jesse founded the Food Freedom Foundation when his seemingly disparate areas of study converged to make clear the fundamental incompatibility of extractive and reductionist financial systems and the complexity of ecological regeneration. He believes that the ecological crises and the collapse of food systems around the globe are symptoms of deeper failures — in broken money, in flawed incentive structures, and in reductionist agriculture. The Food Freedom Foundation is his attempt to address those root causes directly.