Dorothy Suput
Senior Fellow at the Croatan Institute
Dorothy Suput is a Senior Fellow at the Croatan Institute, an independent, nonprofit research and action institute. The Croatan Institute’s mission is to build social equity and ecological resilience by leveraging finance to create pathways to a just economy. Dorothy’s work is guided by a desire to contribute to a world where we are living within planetary boundaries. Her career is focused on developing regenerative farm and food systems. Dorothy trained as a biologist, became a Farm Bill organizer, and honed her skills in program and organizational development. A hallmark of her approach is to address immediate needs while contributing to system change.
She is an independent consultant working at the intersection of soil health, farm viability, local and regional food systems, and financing. Clients include non-profits, community development finance institutions, and economic development agencies in the US and EU. Her projects range from program and businesses development to non-profit capacity and leadership development to federal advocacy.
She founded The Carrot Project, one of the first US organizations connecting private investors to sustainable farms. The work was guided by multi-stakeholder research to understand why farmers struggled to get financing, examining the twin roles of business technical assistance and financing in farm viability, and the development of outcome- based trainings. The Carrot Project’s programs helped hundreds of start-up sustainable farms succeed while influencing how farms across the US get financing. Dorothy co-founded the Agricultural Viability Alliance to bolster the ecosystem for business development services and steward the National Farm Viability Conference.
Dorothy grew up in the Midwest where her interest in conservation and the environment began. After college, she moved to Switzerland as a student research fellow in a biology lab and then worked for Swiss and German biochemical companies. Her commitment to local and regional farm and food systems grew out of the incredible contrasts of Midwestern agriculture to the locally focused, frequently organic, food and farming system in Switzerland. She serves on the board of the Flexible Capital Fund, which provides revenue-based financing in the natural resource and working lands space, and the Northeast SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education) Technical Committee, and the Advisory Board for The Carrot Project. When not immersed in work that she loves, you can find her outdoors (hiking, horseback riding, gardening); reading fiction or history; and practicing German.