Betting (on) the Farm

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U.S. Presenting Sponsor, Invesco QQQ, Presenting Sponsors, All Spring Global Investments, Niam, and Principal Asset Management. Participating Sponsor, Southern Company. Register at BloombergLive.com slash Invest slash Radio. Hello and welcome to What Goes Up, a weekly markets podcast. My name is Mike Regan, I'm a senior editor at Bloomberg. And I'm Voldana Huyerk, a cross-asset reporter with Bloomberg. And this week on the show, Voldana, I don't know if I've ever told you about this, but sometimes I literally have daydreams that I own a farm and I'm like off in retirement as a farmer. I think everybody has those streams, no? I don't know, did I? Especially if you live in the city, you want a sort of more nature-filled life. A more nature-filled life, I guess that makes sense. Or you want a garden or something? Don't get me wrong, I don't want a giant 500 acre farm that I actually have to work at. I want a cup of few acres. You don't want to have to do any work. I'll plant some raspberries, maybe get some sheep. I think sheep would require a lot of work. You think? I think you just spring them loose, let them eat through grass and shave them down once a year? No, I don't think so. What else do you need to do? Feed them? I don't know, bait them? That's what the grass is for. But anyway, look, it's a good week to daydream about being a farm group. Because, let's be honest, today is Wednesday, May 24th. If we tried to cover the market right now with the debt ceiling issue going on, and that being so fast, moving, and such an unpredictable thing, I feel like by the time we got done, everything would have changed and the news would be so different. I think for this week, let's all daydream about owning a farm. If I let you own my farm, I know you refuse to join my professional network on LinkedIn, for I don't know. But if I were to allow you onto my imaginary farm network, what would you grow on my farm? Tomatoes. Just tomatoes? We can use them to feed your sheep. I don't think sheep eat tomatoes, I think they just eat the grass. I really don't know. No cauliflower, you wouldn't grow cauliflower. You're a city slicker. Yeah, I don't know if I'm going to let you on my farm, on my imaginary farm. Fine, I won't let you on my imaginary farm. But our guests might have a farm. I want to bring him in. It's Carter Maloy, CEO and founder of AcreTrader. Carter, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast and talk about your company. Thanks for having me here. First of all, are you on a farm? Not today, though, many days I am. I also, while I would love to invite you guys to my farm, I'm also not really sure I want to join. See, there you go. I'm not the only one. Fine, fine. I'm alone on my farm with my raspberry and sheep, tomato eating sheep. But Carter, tell us about AcreTrader. Really a fascinating platform you've started here that actually lets people and, I suppose, institutions invest in fractional ownership of farms. Tell us a little bit how it started, how it works, and what's going on with AcreTrader. For the quick background of the business, we've been here for five or six years working on this simple mission of connecting farmers that want to grow their business, to investors that want exposure to farmland in their portfolio. I grew up in a farming family here in Arkansas. I spent a dozen years in professional equity investing, but in the background, I've been buying and selling farmland. There's a big passion of mine. Come to find out, there are a lot of other people that also want exposure. The reality is you may have to go put down a million dollars and then manage a business. And that's a non-starter for most people. So we designed AcreTrader very simply to be a place where an investor can come online, create an account and within a few minutes and a few clicks, actually invest directly in entities that own farmland. So each week we put up a farm or two that's owned by a unique entity. You, the investor, can come on and invest 10, 20,000 dollars or millions of dollars and have exposure and build a portfolio of farmland through our website and through our technology. Okay, so tell us more about how it works and who the investor base is. So is it accredited investors who are really interested in diversifying their portfolios? Or what does the makeup of the client base look like? That's correct. It is accredited investors on the platform. Now that ranges from folks in cities to farmers in rural areas and folks that live near farming to institutions as well, family offices, etc. The goal for most folks is to find some stability and some diversification. That's often why we see folks with real interest in farmland is that slow and steady compounding that they can offer to investors. So if I'm a farmer, I own a farm. I sell it to one of these entities. I guess they serve sort of as the manager of this investment. They collect the rent and distribute it among the investors. Is that basically it? Most often the farmer comes to us actually and it's usually a farmer that wants to grow. If you think about this from the farmer's standpoint, many farmers are in growth mode, they have lots of fixed costs, very expensive equipment, more inputs, seed and fertilizer as an example that they buy the better discounts they get. With that type of economy of scale in that business, many farmers are actively in growth mode. So they will come to us and say, hey, my neighbor is retiring or for whatever reason, the farm is being sold. Upwards of $100 billion of farmland is bought and sold every year in the US. So these farmers that are our partners are not actively helping source and find farm where they want to grow their business. And then you're exactly right. We set that up where they often will have a financial interest in that entity and then they will either share their revenue or pay a simple rent to that entity, which then can be a cash distribution out to those investors. So the investors from their angle, they can make money from those cash friends coming in as well as through appreciation of land over time. And then tell us more about your background and the impetus for starting the company. My dad's a farmer. I've been around my whole life. It's just in my blood. I think it's in all of our blood, right? You guys say you have this dream of living an agrarian life. It's because we all did at some point generations back. I spent my life grinding out alpha in public markets and working really long days on Bloomberg Terminal looking for alpha. And in the background, I was buying and selling land and realized that here's this multi trillion dollar asset that's been incredibly productive and stable over time. And there was no real mechanism for most folks to get exposure to it. And so that was really the genesis of the business was, frankly, visiting with my dad and telling him that this is in like 2017, and I thought Bitcoin was a terrible investment idea. Really that sparked this conversation of can we fractionalize farmland? Is there a way where common investors can gain exposure to farmland portfolio? What's fascinating is the returns are pretty attractive. There is actually a farmland index that tracks the emotional value of farmland, I guess, around the country. But talk us a little bit about sort of that return profile. My understanding, it's got a pretty good track record. It's not really correlated with risk assets or even treasuries. It is correlated with inflation to some degree. Talk to us about kind of what you can expect from that return profile and the volatility and whatnot as an investor in farmland. First is important to consider what farmland is not. Farmland is not a good risk quick scheme, right? You rarely hear people saying, oh my gosh, I doubled my money on my farmland investment this year. Inversely, you also don't hear people saying, oh my gosh, I lost all my money on farmland this year. What investors often are looking for is that slow and steady compounding of capital. And you're right, those returns may grieve as the index that puts out those returns for farmland and timber land. Over the last 20 or 30 years, it's been a fairly consistent, low double digit return, 11 or 12%. Nothing, oh my goodness, but when you compare it to other mainstream asset classes, that return profile is pretty similar over long periods of time. What's more fascinating is that the consistency of those returns, you don't have big, huge up-years and huge down-years that you do across so many other mainstream asset classes. So again, the consistency of the returns and that relative lack of volatility in investor speed means that the sharp ratio of farmland can be very, very attractive. The risk-adjusted returns there. In addition to that, you've also called out a couple of key themes. One is it can be inflation-linked. It's actually shown to be more inflation-linked than gold in that in times of high inflation or persistent inflation. It tends to outperform. And also that it just doesn't have a lot of correlation to other asset classes. Like it's almost exactly zero in its correlation to the S&P. So from a diversification standpoint as well, we see folks adding farmland with their portfolio to have that sort of set-and-forget partner portfolio where they're looking for company, capital or wealth preservation. I was curious about the correlation aspect as well because I was wondering what pushes prices higher or lower and whether or not maybe you can tie it to the housing market in some way or what market it would be similar to or where some of those correlations might lie. So as a general sense, we don't really see correlations to things like housing market or primary asset classes. Where we do see some correlation, again, over longer periods of time, is commodities. So you think about we grow food, fuel and fiber on farmland. Those tend to be a core component of commodity, CPI, PPI type of indicators. And so as a result, we do tend to be linked to that inflation price over time. And as you can imagine, in the world of supply and demand for farmland commodities, it's fairly straightforward. We have more and more mouths to feed every year and to provide clothing and fuel to and frankly, less and less actual physical farmland. We lose staggering amounts of farmland every minute and every day here in the US to development, to growth, to other now larger solar developments, things like that. So finite supply, it's physical and it's limited and shrinking and growing demand over time to the products that we produce. Income is back and Van Eck has you covered with VETFs to bring income to your portfolio. Find the yield, duration and credit exposure you're looking for from Van Eck's range of income-focused ETFs, which includes municipal bonds, corporate bonds, international bonds, equity income, floating-rate instruments and multi-asset income with Van Eck's income-investing yield monitor at ThinkYield.com. You can easily track Van Eck's ETF yields, as well as the monthly flows and performance of each income ETF category. Take advantage of the back-to-income play, explore Van Eck's income ETFs at ThinkYield.com and find the right ETF for you. Investing risk includes principal loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Visit Van Eck.com to view a perspective that includes investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses and other information that you should read and consider carefully. Van Eck ETFs are distributed by Van Eck Securities Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Van Eck Associates Corporation. Join Bloomberg Live in San Francisco on June 20th for Bloomberg's Intelligent Automation Briefing about transformation in a time of uncertainty. During a special evening event, top business and IT executives will gather to explore ways in which intelligent automation can offset economic pressures and help organizations thrive by enhancing operational efficiencies and stakeholder value. This program is proudly sponsored by IBM. Register at BloombergLive.com slash automation slash radio. So I'm curious about the risk management or potential downside of this type of investment. Say I buy a fractional ownership in a farm in a state where there's a bad drought or I don't know a ball weevil, a outbreak or something that really impacts the production of whatever they're growing on that farm that year so much so that the farmer can't pay his rent and maybe even the faults on his tractor lease or equipment or whatever and has a net loss for that year. How does that play out in an investment like this? We tend to think of the world generally speaking as Opco and Propco. Your operating company is the farming business. Your property company is owning the underlying land and so we tend to look more to be the property company in that scenario whereas the farmer is the operating company. They often have insurance to help backstop them often government subsidized insurance at that. So as a tenant and as a partner farmers tend to be very stable over time and as a result we see we do see very low default in our vacancy rates throughout the ecosystem. As an example of that in the world of row crops so thinking about growing important commodities like corn, soybeans, farmers often pay pays rent once a year before they plant. It's incredibly stable across the larger world of farmland for that reason. There are certainly risks in there and one of the greatest ones is just underwriting risk making sure that you are actually in fact buying farmland well and it's really hard to do because there's such a lack of information in our world. So we've invested heavily we've got a large data science and engineering crew here as an example helping to build underlying geospatial analytics and data for us just to help inform these underwriting decisions and we've got a great team as well outbuilding partnerships with farmers what actually makes it through that very very tight filter that that team employs. I do want to ask you more about that because when I was talking to some of your employees before the podcast when I met them a couple of weeks ago I think somebody said it's like you can almost think of it as like the Bloomberg terminal but for farmland statistics and for farmland data first I want to ask you like how is farmland performing of late and I'm also curious how it fared like what prices did during the pandemic for instance and what it's been like over the last couple of years. So as a general statement on the appreciation side of the years before the pandemic the five or six years before then we saw relatively muted appreciation. We have seen some catch up in that long-term you know call it mean reversion in terms of appreciation the last few years so we've seen more meaningful call it double-digit versus your typical single-digit type of growth in the underlying asset. The rents themselves are the income coming off the farm generally speaking has also grown over that same time period. I'm curious if there's any sort of shareholder democracy type of components to this you know if I end up owning say 51 percent of a farm or you know I own 30 percent and of like mine was someone that owns another 30 percent and we have that majority stake is there sort of an option to say oh you know I think we need to start growing corn instead of soybeans or I think it's time to sell is there any sort of equity democracy at action as far as ownership you know or is it all the property companies and the operating companies that control that. It tends to be the latter so we have an investment committee that works on behalf of the investors to consider what the best outcomes are for those investors on an entity by entity basis and the reason for that is we and then aside from that we also have common standardized corporate wraps and governance wraps around these entities for obvious reasons that tend those tend to be pretty standardized across our business and what we want to avoid is a 51 percent dollar coming in bully right actually making decisions that are averse to the best outcome for the rest of that majority or rest that minority investor pool so so as a whole that tends to be more of the investment committee now look we speak to investors we've got an investor relations team here we hear their input every day and we certainly take that that that means a lot to each of these individual investments but again we have to consider the greater hole of investment pooled capital there rather than one individual's desires and so Carter to go back to the data mining question like how do you guys go about gathering your data what actually makes good farmland when you are evaluating it and then where in the US or even internationally are you guys operating so in the US we're in I think 18 or 19 states plus Australia so we're well over 40,000 acres invested through our platform in terms of the what considerations go into underwriting you've got to consider soil profile so the health of that soil water water availability is absolutely crucial and or places like the Midwest actually getting water off of the farm is just as important as it is finding water so water's a really intense consideration the climate in that area what is it good to grow and then the financial profile right so you're you're underwriting the the farmer themselves and that's an entire separate process and then the actual bones of that farm the structure of it and this is where the data analytics really comes in is helpful that's that can be government data sets that we're processing and bringing in satellite data sets as well that we're bringing in towards rules and then importantly things like comparable sales I know this sounds ridiculous but if you're buying a home you got a pretty good sense of value on price per square foot in that neighborhood in farmland not only do we not have that data but the idiosyncrasies and quality from one parcel to the next can be pretty dramatic so as a result for gathering data there is an example we're in with data from thousands of courthouses around the US we also have a team of people who are literally going and attending auctions virtually or going online and finding information manually and putting into that system but that's the reality of this older industry to work in is there is a real manual data gathering and filtering and analysis process that goes into helping us understand and inform each investment decision I was clicking around on the website and for a daydream farmer like myself it's the pictures that are just awesome you know you get these big aerial views of the farms and there's videos sometimes and I think he now got me daydreaming about owning a vineyard instead of a farm vildana I think I might want a vineyard there's a sounds like you're ready to move there's a there's like passing your bag California vineyard I've got my eye on after clicking around acre shader but these daydreams are all adjacent to my daydream of winning the lottery by the way that that's all right this is all going to happen do you even play the lottery when it's over a billion in payout a group of friends of mine springs in action and we we all buy a share I don't even want to know what the most is that you've ever won like 12 12 cents is this the podcast about logical and reasonable investing yes it's supposed to be yes fair enough fair enough but Carter I'm curious what you know sort of the regulatory regime is for you you know are you you're registered investment advisor like how does this company exist in the eyes of the regulators and and what process do you have to go to both federally and state by state to launch a product like this we've actually gone quite a bit further and stood up our own broker dealer so acre trader has a wholly owned broker dealer in order to to make sure that we are always compliant with the letter and the spirit of the law and it extends beyond securities regulation as well right there are farming regulations you must take into account ownership regulations a real estate regulation state by state suffice to say we have an incredible general counsel and team of attorneys that work with her to help us navigate and and make sure that we are continuously presenting ourselves and and the investment offerings and the appropriate way and car now I'm also curious about how liquid the market is I would imagine it's pretty illiquid but maybe you can tell us more that's that's correct so the market as a whole the percent turnover within farmland is lower than comparative assets there's still 50 upwards of a hundred billion dollars of the stuff that trades hands every year in the United States alone so there's still quite a bit of and there's a ton of reasons why folks would would buy our soul farmland right so there's a decent amount of turnover out there we obviously as a company want to help improve that liquidity within the market and then within our specific business we've been working on a secondary marketplace for a long time where we would hope to allow investors to then exchange that individual units or shares of those funds yeah I was going to say I imagine a platform like yours would bring a lot more liquidity potentially in theory to this market but as of now so if I put click around the website it looks like 15,000 is tends to be the minimum investment is that about right give or take that's usually right yeah so and I'm locked in for at least a year I think right what's the liquidity event for me if I do want to get out of that investment how does that work so the vehicles usually have a five to ten year life on them sometimes it can be longer that's this is explicitly stated on the website sometime it can be shorter than that so there's the duration of the vehicle itself but the investor must take into account and the ill liquidity that comes along with that and we are looking for again this is the sort of like your patient investing capital so setting it on the side a little bit so there is a real liquidity consideration investing in farmland not just through a platform in the asset in general and then again I think you nailed the specific point there's a one-year minimum regulatory lock up on these types of securities at which point you can have the ability to sell out to friends or family and we hope soon through a secondary marketplace within our business as well and then can you tell us about any ESG aspects when it comes to investing in farmland is that maybe one of the considerations or one of the things clients do tell you when they are looking to invest is that a consideration they do and it's an important one we we don't lead with ESG often that can be like meeting somebody for the first time and they say hey you can trust me we believe is like you know stewards of this world we live in and it's human beings and it's the right thing to do so the impact for farmers and growing their business is certainly important we enroll each farm in a sustainability standard called leading harvest so that we're not just using words like regenerative or throwing around buzzwords this is like a merit based checklist based sustainability standard on a on a per farm basis that we enroll we actually just passed all of our farmers through that here recently we're very proud of that milestone and then beyond that we do tend to invest pretty intensely in things like CAPEX projects water projects to make sure we're utilizing water appropriately and not overusing it we do a good number of organic transitions in some cases with farmers as well so well all of those are heavily considered in the investment process and an important part of what we do we have an impact page on our website where investors can can go find that information as well Carter obviously in investing the magic word that always comes up is diversification and I wonder obviously if you're allocating some percentage to farmland you're diversifying away from a lot of traditional assets but I wonder in the future do you think there'll be a potential to sort of diversify within farmland for example say I do want to invest 15,000 in farmland but I want to split up a thousand over 15 farms kind of a mutual fund of farmland is there a lane for that to happen to you think in the future? We've evaluated a number of pooled vehicle type of products and I think there is a likely future where that exists and the other consideration then too is we do see lots of folks come build that portfolio within our platform so most of our investors invest in multiple farms and you can think about our world broken into three primary buckets that is row crops so things that you plant each year corn, cotton, soybeans, rice, where I come from then there are permanent crops things that grow in trees tend to be longer duration assets and then timber land is a third component of this land investing category and it's its own unique beast but we do see folks quite often building a diversified portfolio within our website across those value steps income is back and Van Eck has you covered with VETFs to bring income to your portfolio find the yield duration and credit exposure you're looking for from Van Eck's range of income focused ETFs which includes municipal bonds corporate bonds international bonds equity income floating rate instruments and multi-asset income with Van Eck's income investing yield monitor at thinkyield.com you can easily track Van Eck's ETF yields as well as the monthly flows and performance of each income ETF category take advantage of the back-to-income play explore Van Eck's income ETFs at thinkyield.com and find the right ETF for you investing risk includes principal loss past performance is no guarantee of future results visit vanec.com to view a perspective that includes investment objectives risks fees expenses and other information that you should read and consider carefully Van Eck ETFs are distributed by Van Eck Securities Corporation a wholly owned subsidiary of Van Eck Associates Corporation the race to shape Africa's future is a contest for influence access and alliances across the continent rich in culture abundant in natural resources and bursting with human potential Africa is primed to become the next hub of global industry on June 13th and 14th Bloomberg new economy gathers leaders to confront the pressing issues facing Africa's economy rising food and energy prices supply chain shocks and financial constraints request an invitation to the live event in Morocco at bloombergneweconomy.com Carter we can't let you go just yet we have a tradition here on what goes up where every week we talk about the craziest things we saw in markets this week or we're flexible this month this year whatever you got what do you have for us this week okay mine is so good actually so Taylor Swift has been on tour as the entire world knows I think it's supposed to be like the highest grossing tour in the history of the world and she played in Gillette Stadium a couple of days ago and it it was pouring rain and now there's at least one fan I couldn't actually tell if it's more than one person who was at that show bottled a bunch of the rainwater put it in containers and is selling it on Facebook marketplace for 250 per container oh my gosh so apparently there were a bunch of comments I want to say they're from Swifties who are probably serious about this who commented like is it rainwater from inside the stadium or is it from the parking lot because it makes a difference well that's a big thing but my daughter and her friends actually went just to hang out in the parking lot in Philadelphia and there were like 30,000 people there just listening from the outside this is such a phenomenon like like nothing all right next time I'm sending her with gallon drugs to collect you just have to label it like the and just like tailor you know whatever happened like and there's no room for fraud in that market whatsoever I'm sure you can tell when you look at the rainwater that it was from there how about you Carter you see anything crazy recently you know the conversation around proposals for banning short selling seems pretty wild to me like a really bad idea we learned that once around 2008 and yet here we are again and every person just about involved in that decision at that moment came back and said whoa that was a bad idea it didn't help and here we are again talking about it so that one's bothering me a little bit and the other is the obvious conversation around the debt ceiling and let's put aside like the debt ceiling conversation itself the reality of like black swan events right and we get used to the escalator on the way up and we forget there's an elevator on the way down in markets and the world of black swan events it feels like as maybe as I get older they tend to pop their heads up more and more and again like a reason why we like stability and what we do but in all seriousness you know it feels as though many investors don't hedge against that appropriately right what we see open calls pretty pretty wide on the the VIX right now and so plenty like doom hedging going on but it still feels like markets don't appropriately appreciate nor do individual investors hedge those types of risks in their portfolio good good points all around and you know it reminds me of I think probably the most appealing or one of the most appealing aspects of farmland is that scarcity notion and that they're not making any more farmland um one's last time you heard you know this neighborhood was torn down and a farm was put in its place so the opposite of crypto there with the never ending supply it scares and getting scarcer by the day so all right great stuff all around I'll give you mine I professed mine it's not exactly markets related but it is financial related and it speaks to duration risk to some degree I'm stretching that a little bit but I'll give it to you anyway this is courtesy of USA Today I'll just read you the lead because it speaks for itself an overdue book has been returned to a northern California library after nearly 100 years it was the name of the book was a history of the United States by Benson Lawson was published in 1892 so missing a few things in a in a history of the United States published in 1892 somehow some guy found this in his house realized it was a library book returned it to the library sure enough they're very happy to have it back 96 years late so you're probably wondering what's the financial angle of this well now it's time to play the prices precise what do you think the estimated overdue fee is for a library book that was 96 years late start with you Valdana get get out your Texas instrument calculator and start start doing some some meth this is really hard and also I can't believe that this library is still around and open that they're able to accept this back that's pretty amazing okay I'm gonna go with three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars Carter standard prices right rules in effect what do you guess the overdue bill is you know even though we're playing prices right rules I'll lean in a little harder I'll go ten thousand ten thousand seventeen hundred bucks which to me is the crazy part that it wow it is only seventeen hundred bucks after 96 years I went yeah I think well you're both over but I guess your closest will we'll give it to you okay I win all right all right fine the rare w for Valdana prices precise but the library you know it doesn't sit obviously they're not going to charge this guy because he didn't check it out presumably I don't think he's 130 years old Carter great to catch up with you and and hear all about acre trader really fascinating asset class I think and I'm gonna go back on there now and daydream about there's a pistachio farm to that club my eye what's your uh have any farms come up that you've just been like wow this is this is the one I if I had eight million I'd buy this one you know I have pretty regularly invested on our platform so I'm a I'm a big fan of what what our team does and the quality of farm offers that they're very diplomatic answer there I know I was like that's not even an answer no one's listening you can tell us Carter thanks so much for your time we really appreciate it Michael Donna thank you both it's been a pleasure what goes up we'll be back next week until then you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal website and app or wherever you get your podcast we'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show so more listeners can find us you can find us on twitter follow me at Vildana Hyrick Mike Regan is at Reganonymous you can also follow Bloomberg podcasts at podcasts what goes up is produced by Stacey Wong and our head of podcasts is Sage Baumann thanks for listening and we'll see you next week change can be disruptive but at Bloomberg we think bigger our sell side solutions combine trading and automation with market leading data so you can evolve scale and embrace change this is Bloomberg for the sell side visit Bloomberg dot com slash sell side