YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Zick

lines on the record: 92
first: 2025-11-07
most recent: 2025-11-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And it's all fixed rate mortgage debt, but we were just always very conservative. And I think some of that conservatism now you'd say, well, maybe that was overly conservative, but we also didn't get burned and you don't move from 30 million to 2 billion by being overly aggressive or you don't do it all at once. You have to do it over time. And that's kind of how what we've focused on.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's the things we miss that we wish we had done. But today we're in a position that we use no leverage when buying properties. They're all cash purchases. You know, you can never say your bulletproof, but we have a great balance sheet. But over time, we were still doing missionary work in terms of telling people this is a real asset class. So we were using leverage to purchase properties just when we didn't have new money coming in. So we've always been very conservative. And in farmland, leverage is a different beast. You know, you can't buy a farm.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think when I think about it now, there are very few farms we missed on that I wouldn't love to own today. And being able to look back in the rearview mirror and say that would have been a great purchase, you know, that's always interesting.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the rest of my life. So I think being able to build up your network because sometimes you can pull on a thread and you won't know where it'll go. And so that's what that idea of talking to someone at an endowment to say, kind of do a reference check for these people. I'm talking to and they just say, well, you should talk to this other person instead. And you just never know what path you're going to go down. Leverage that.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think back to, you know, building the network is probably the most important thing you can ever do because there's so many people that are good at whatever you think you're good at. There's someone that's better at it for sure, whether it's modeling, you know, thinking about investing, whatever it may be, someone's always better. So to me, building that network and you can't be full of it. Like you have to be genuine when you're talking to people. But I think that's been the best thing I've ever done. And that's the thing I can, and that's why I take a lot of time. I mean, we get a lot of people that reach out to us with all types of questions. And all of the portfolio managers on our team grew up on family farms. They all went and worked in finance. And there's probably a lot of Wall Street people, not per capita, but generally a lot of Wall Street people that grew up on farms and had this great foundation of hard work. And then they figured, we'll just, I'll never be able to use that again.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have a lot of windshield time, so I listen to a lot of podcasts. So, you know, invest like the best, obviously, you know, Meb Faber, Jeremy Schwartz, Barry Ritholz, I listen to a lot of business podcasts. I also love sports. So I listen to a lot of ringer podcasts too around sports and entertainment on the streaming side. I rewatch the wire every year. Really? It's just my favorite show ever. And so I do that every year. I'm now watching Severance, which is an interesting I'm not all the way done with the three seasons yet.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they should do that. I mean, we have to get them out of our house, the iPads and stuff within our, that's a bigger battle to get through. But yeah, it's something that's just eye-opening.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an eye-opening book about social media. And when people have their phones, just how it impacts their life. And so our Jesuit high school did away with cell phones. And I think it's the greatest thing they could have done.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a book, and I mentioned water is just such an important thing. A book that I read often, it's called Water, the Epic Struggle for Power and Civilization. And it really talks through, it's a history book, but it talks through the success of civilizations around their ability to access clean water and their ability to treat dirty water and get rid of it. And it's just a fascinating story of, and I kind of the growth throughout the world, population growth. But something I'm reading now that, or I just finished, and it's because I'm on the board of my high school, they just did away with cell phones. And it's the anxious generation. And it's really hate.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time, I want to be their mentor because I know they'll be better than me. And that to me has been the most important thing.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My career, someone at Morgan Stanley that I think really made a difference for me was Arthur Lev, who had come from Front Point. He was the head of chief legal officer there. And he was probably the biggest proponent of me going to Cirrus. He said, you have to do this. Why would you not? And I've worked with some great people that, you know, having been at Lehman Brothers, there's a lot of people that got vaporized that I really respected. And you just think, okay, if you're going to take a chance on something, you got to do it. And seeing kind of what's happened over time throughout my career, a lot has occurred. You know, it's all shaped you in a different way. And our founder, Perry Beeth, I mean, I think about this today and five years I'll be 52. And that's when he started Cirrus, when he was 52. And it was completely different than being the fixed income money manager that he was. And, you know, building a great team, I think, is the best thing he did. And the people that we've been able to hire.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they both grew up on dairy farms, and we grew up on my dad's family farm, and my parents were both very well educated. Remember, some of my best memories as a kid were having dinner watching Jeopardy with them. And we were always shocked. How did they know all these answers? They ran the table. Exactly. We were not very successful. But, you know, our parents were really focused on education and just doing something better. We'll always have the family farm. My mom still lives there today. And it's great to go back there. But, you know, they really encouraged all of us go do something else and gave us the opportunity. There was no pressure for any of us to come back to the farm. They actually said, I remember my dad telling me the year you were born and the year you graduated high school, the price of milk was the same. This is not a long-term strategy. So I'll start with them, but I had some great folks I've worked with throughout.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll start with my parents because they encouraged all of us, the six of us in our family, do something else. We know this is not a common.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of there's no cheap beta. There'll be a lot of expensive beta out there. There are still alpha generators. And this is an asset class that you just have to go pick a manager. You can't just say asset allocation helps us and gets us there. You have to pick a manager. There's no Vanguard.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think most people don't understand just the sophistication of the farmers they're dealing with. When people say, what's going on in agriculture, they paint with a very broad brush and you wouldn't say that if you said, what's going on in accounting? Well, there's some great accountants and probably some poor ones or what's going on in any industry. You have to look at who are the people leading the way. And that's who we try to partner with because we think they will help us generate the best returns. Whenever that Bloomberg, Indiana farmland Go exists, it's going to be pretty fully priced, I think. It'll be much more efficient. The inefficiency is still out there. And I think that's what we're able to, I won't say take advantage of, but that's what we've been able to lever over time is focusing on that inefficiency. There will be a lot more money that comes in investing in farmland. We're seeing crowdsourcing of farms. We're seeing more public reach that are going to be launched and that will be out there. But I think it's a long way when you”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And something as easy as if you said 20 years ago you had irrigation on a property, these big irrigation pivots, and there's some publicly traded companies that manufacture all these in the US, like Valley and Lindsay. And 20 years ago, if a farmer had 20 pivots, they'd have to have five or six different people in the morning get in a truck and go out and start them up. And then throughout the day drive by and make sure they're still running. Now that farmer can control everything from his or her iPhone. They can start it, monitor. They have soil moisture probes, or they moisture probes out in the soil so that they know, do we need it? In some cases, they are using AI or some learning mechanisms to say, well, based on is it going to rain, we're not going to turn itself on. So farmers are subscribing to some of this kind of smart data to go out there and make them a better operator. And those are the farmers that when you look at who are the people that are going to grow, they're the ones that are.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they also use probes to get out there, trust butt verify. You go out there and do that. And then they can use variable rate applications of fertilizer and seed. So an acre of ground, of really high quality black dirt, they might plant 35,000 seeds per acre. But then in the sandier, lower quality soil, it's only 20,000. and achieve the same yield. So what you're doing is saving money on the seed, applying fertilizer so that it's not running off. And farmers don't want waste either because that's money that's just rolling away.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, technology, I would say in agriculture is moving as fast as anywhere. And it's really because there are real tactical issues around labor is too expensive. The cost of inputs has gone up. So to talk to our farmers, and that's a big part of our underwriting is we want farmers who are using the latest technology. Whereas in the past, if someone was planning a crop, they would broadcast equally across the entire field the fertilizer, the seeds. And when you look at actually some of these farms, the soil types and quality throughout a farm.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think over time, we're going to see more and more of that high revenue production move there. So we view that as an opportunity. A risk is always does the cost of labor outpace technology growth? We've seen, and part of the reason we like row crops are because there's more technology being implemented and much less labor.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might cost a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. The cost of the well itself is a million dollars to grow that same celery, maybe less of it because you're not growing year-round in Michigan. That well cost $50,000 and it costs $200 a year to operate. So even if the labor cost was same, same, the cost of production is much less. And every crop in the U.S. almost every crop moves west to east toward the population center. So if you're east of the Mississippi, you've cut a huge freight cost off of the cost of production too.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of that today, a lot of produce has grown in Mexico, and that's labor is the biggest issue. Labor there is next to nothing. So if people don't care if they're blueberries or if they're watermelons, say USA, then it will all come from Mexico if people don't care because it's just from a cost of production standpoint, it's so much less. But in California, the cost of water. So let's say you have a well that you need to pump a thousand gallons a minute to grow celery.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in terms of opportunity, I mean, we think there's just so much capacity out there to continue to invest in the current markets where we are today, but within the US, we think the world's going to continue to need food. As water becomes more expensive in other parts of the US, so California as an example or Arizona, as an example, a lot of those crops that people want to have the USA sticker on so vegetables, produce they're going to be grown more at least seasonally in areas where they're cheaper to grow.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, water is going to be a gating issue or a gating factor in a lot of areas. And you're seeing not just regulation, but restriction all across the country. So we want to be in areas where water is plentiful. It's one thing to have a paper water right. It's another to have water availability. And that's what we focus on.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Farmers out there that are all looking to grow, they're all looking to add acres. And so that makes a very competitive market from the rental side. Some of the stuff that, you know, investing in the US isn't a risk, but there are a lot of people and a lot of managers that invest outside of the US. Currency risk is a big deal. Sovereign risk is a big deal. I mean, there's been many investors that have had more than their hands slapped for buying land in South America, particularly in Brazil, that they found out the group they bought it from might not have been the owner. And there's a lot of things that we think transparency is key, but we really like title insurance. We like rule of law. So we invest in the U.S. We invest in areas that are very friendly to farmers. And so we don't own any land in California today. Maybe we will at some point. I think that's a little bit more difficult from a regulatory environment. And water is something that we view as longer term.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's, I mean, part of what the way we've constructed this portfolio, I mean, Perry was really prescient when he thought about the Great Lakes, the Midwest. It wasn't just because he was from Wisconsin or he was traveling to the Midwest. It's because in the Midwest we have the best soil, some of the best water resources. And what I mean by that is these recharging aquifers, the Great Lakes aquifers, but also it rains during the crop season. So the cheapest form of irrigation is still just rains. You don't have to turn anything on or do anything. But there are parts of the south and the west where it doesn't rain when you're growing a crop or it's very sporadic. So you can't really grow a crop without irrigation. In the Midwest, it's more supplemental. So from a risk management standpoint, it starts with good soil, good water. We like good infrastructure so you can move your crops around. You also, and I had mentioned earlier, we like areas where it's a highly competitive market for rent because we're renting ground. We want to have lots of”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have drought, that's a problem. So we like to have farms where we can do some of that cappacks, like adding irrigation or adding drainage so that you can help manage some of those risks.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For investors is we try to identify farmers that are the most well positioned to have whatever pricing power they can get. So they have to have scale so that when they're buying inputs that they can go out and negotiate the best price possible, you want farmers that can store their grain so they're not selling it all at harvest. They want to be able to sell it into the spring when other people don't have the crop. Yeah. So hopefully you get that positive carry. So we try to identify those folks. But when you're looking at investing in farmland, what are the downsides? Well, there are certain just climate issues. So if you're close to a river and it floods, that's a problem. If you have very sandy soils and it doesn't rain,”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so on being a farmer is a very difficult business. I mean, there are so many different risk factors and so many decision points that you can make that completely can impact your bottom line in a material way, not just what crop you grow and when you plant, but when you sell it, how you sell it, who you sell it to, how you store your grain, and all these things can change year to year. And to your point, and this kind of goes back to there hasn't been a lot of institutional roll-up yet on the land side, but the people that sell inputs to farmers and the inputs can be seed, fertilizer, equipment, whatever it may be, and the buyers of their crop, the large grain buyers out there, your bungees and ADMs and cargills, they all have a lot of pricing power. Your average farmer doesn't have any pricing power. So they're a price taker on the input side. They're a price taker on the crop side. So part of our value add.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No Yeah, and they want to continue to buy farmland. And a lot of farmers, I mean, it's really interesting when you talk to them and you'd say, well, what's your dream scenario? And one of our tenants who sold some land to a solar company and they were selling land for a data center, I said, well, what's your goal? And they said, well, we want to continue to farm. We just want to do it debt-free. So it's not like they just want to buy a place in Florida. They'll have one, but they want to continue to farm. So they want to go buy more farmers.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taxes sometimes, yeah, it's about 18 months, and they have to identify properties, but they have to go out there and reinvest it in kind of like-like to keep their cost basis. And farmers are really good at, you know, figuring their way around these tax codes and good for them. And I think that's a lot of the competition we see are 1031 buyers because there's just big dollars getting thrown around.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, some of the competition we see when we're buying farms, it's not just farmers that had profitable years, it's farmers that have 1031 exchange money because they sold land to a data center or they would have land.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. It's interesting. They'll sell for a very high price. And when that development doesn't happen, they'll buy it back for less and they'll wait for the next round of development and sell it again.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suburbs of Chicago have extended and extended and extended, and farmers are, you know, I consider them dumb as a fox. They'll sell for a fox.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it makes a ton of sense, especially if you're building greenfield when you can actually, it's tough to retrofit things for solar. And even when we look at farmland that goes to solar, the idea of these little community solar gardens I don't think is very scalable. You tend to see more industrial size solar fields. And it's, you know, from the landowner standpoint or the farmer's standpoint, or if a farmer is the owner, they're interested in the highest and best use. So what you tend to see is we have farm tenants that they sell land for development all the time. These farmers are very sophisticated. They're CEOs. This has been happening for generations where someone will sell land that's close to town for a very high price and then they'll move 20 miles farther out and buy three times the amount of land and set up shop there. So while the idea of a farmer moving always seems really hard to believe this has been happening forever, the Western”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of fears around it. And so if you look at what do we need, there's no energy, in my opinion, there's no energy transition that will ever happen. We need more of everything. That's really cool.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And the hard thing when you think about power, I mean, I kind of laugh. I had two siblings that both went to Cornell, so I've been to Ithaca quite a bit. We own farms in upstate New York. And every time I drive from our farms there down to our family farm in northeastern Pennsylvania, you'll drive through parts of New York State that will say no industrial, you'll see signs that say no industrial solar, no wind farms, no fracking, no nuclear. But they all turn on their lights. So we have this really perverse view out there that, and you could call it nimbyism, you can call it whatever you want, but we need more of everything. More power for sure. Yeah, if you look at, there's a few great graphs out there that show kind of the history of consumption for power and the same amount of coal that's been used throughout history this year will be the year that the most coal is used, the most peat that's ever been burned or wood is happening this year, the most oil produced or burned now.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potentially. Yeah. I mean, the idea of when a data center is going in or even a big manufacturing facility, sometimes you'll see co-location of solar. And while solar has a lot of benefits, it's not going to power something like that. That's more just, I think, for credits to sell into the grid. I mean, we have Three Mile Island potentially coming back on. So there's a lot of different options. And I think across states like New York State, they've closed down some nuclear facilities or consolidated. Well, sure, I'm never.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like some of that is definitely happening and will continue. I mean, ultimately, some of these data centers will all be powered by modular nukes when you get down to it. Thorium?”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, groups like Amazon, Meta. It seems like what you're finding now is a lot less hoteling space for data centers, and they're all single user. And it seems like they're going after the best locations, which would be large tracks of land close to infrastructure. So you want natural gas, you need three-phase power with capacity on the line, you need fiber lines or rail access to run fiber, and you need water. And while there are multiple ways for cooling water,”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it firsthand now in the Midwest the amount of additional building that's happening around data centers is unbelievable and the amount of capital that's being invested in these areas like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois around data center development, it's really staggering when you think about it. So there's just outside of South Bend Indiana, two very large data center projects that I think each is investing between 9 and 11 billion on these data centers. And the real estate price, even if it's, I think our average cost per acre across our portfolios is about $8,000. You see data center prices anywhere from $100 to $300,000 acre.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have problems of aridity or erosion, but you have a lot of development pressure coming in. The cities are expanding, manufacturing's expanding. So there are acres that farmers lose for those reasons every year.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they'll graze the cattle, and then eventually take that all the way to market. That's the type of vertical integration you'll see in some areas. In row crops, you just don't see that. We like to identify tenants we're working with that if they have a dairy, so they need the land to feed the cows, they need the land for their nutrient management program, those tenants are willing to pay more for farms if it's a strategic farm that's close by because they can't travel all over the place. But a lot of our tenants, they might have a home base that kind of looks like the center of this table and the radius that they'll travel being willing to farm, you know, they'll rent in these other areas if they can find enough acres to have scale. Because ultimately, every time a son or daughter wants to come back to the farm to help increase that family business, you can't just slice the pie more ways. You have to grow the pie. And I mentioned earlier the amount of total acres in the US is going down every year. And in the Midwest, you don't have...”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some can do both. Not our farm. So our portfolio is exclusively farming, not ranching acres. You tend to see those ranching acres. You know, if you think of what's the highest and best use, if you could grow amongst row crops even, corn is the highest revenue, then soybeans, then we, I mean, cotton would be up there as well. But as you look kind of down the value cycle, ranching would be very low because you're just not generating much rent. So it's more marginal land that's used for that or larger tracts of land. Typically, like one of the big farmland owners is the Mormon church. They're also one of the five largest cattle feeders in the country. So they own a lot of ranch land. They're grazing cattle.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they think about it in terms of protecting acres and growth when you say, well, why would they partner with someone like us? So when we look at farms that would make sense to add to the portfolio, in some cases, we'd pay a little more because it's a strategic farm that's close by. But we say no probably 29 times out of 30. We're at a public auction. The hit rate is low. And while we'd like that to be higher, that's the investment discipline. We will lose sometimes by 40 or 50 percent above our reserve price.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we like cycles. So when farmers have really strong balance sheets, like in 2021 and 2022, they were probably not passing on as many of those purchase options to us. But now we're in our third year of lower commodity prices. Farmers have to be careful about how much working capital they're going to liquidate to go buy a long-term asset. And if it's a very strategic farm to them, they're going to try to buy it very close to home. But if it's something they're willing to travel for and they're currently farming, and as much as they'd like to grow their acres to that point about efficiency, you mentioned they don't want to lose acres. So if a farmer farms 5,000 acres, if one of their landlords who owns 500 sells and they're either not able to buy it or someone that we're partnering with them on, if they're not able to buy it, then they just lose those acres and they immediately become overcapitalized. Every other acre becomes more expensive to farm.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's all relative, but to your point about are there different values for different buyers? Absolutely. Even if two buyers both intend to farm it, there are absolutely differences in how someone will value it. In some cases, on the same land, it comes down to what crop do you intend to grow? So, I had talked briefly about specialty crops, but if there's a farm in northern Indiana with irrigation that comes up, if the tenant we're looking at wants to grow corn and soybeans, they're going to be able to pay us one rent if the tenant we're talking to would grow popcorn and processing tomatoes or potatoes, they can pay us almost double this rent on the same land.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, making decisions because the landowner, I'm not going to say they're not sophisticated, but they're unwilling to do a multi-year lease because they want to have the optionality to sell the property free and clear of a lease if they decide they want to sell it. So usually when farmers look to us, they're saying, well, we want to add a new combine or a tractor or make these overhead or hiring or infrastructure decisions. They actually view a three-year lease as a long-term lease in the farmland space. We have some leases that will go eight or ten years if they're growing more specialty crops. So we have about 20% of our portfolio that generates higher revenue because they're growing things like potatoes for potato chips, processing tomatoes, the kind of highest quality mint you can grow in the world is in the Midwest. So we grow that on our properties. And that requires a more diverse rotation and a longer planning for the farmers. So we'll allow a longer.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we try to target three to five year leases. And I'd say three is the overwhelming majority, given that our farms are mostly growing row crops, you can see three years on the board of trade, you have transparency over to where our prices. So farmers, if they want to hedge, if they want to think about selling a part of their crop into the future, they can do that. And we can all agree, okay, over the next three years, this is what that rental income will be. But when you think about across a farmer's portfolio, I mentioned they own land and they intend to own that forever. That's how they think about it. And they rent our land, and those are usually three-year leases. But then they rent a lot of land from other people. Those other people, even if a farmer's been operating that land for 30 years, it's usually 31-year leases.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are years where we'll do 30 or 40 closings or transactions to invest $80 or $100 million. Most institutional investors would never do that. But we've really decided that that's where you can add a lot of alpha on the acquisition side by doing these boltons at a discount to what that, like you said, it's a very finance worthy strategy. It's just being applied to an asset class that usually don't see it.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 or 12 years ago, but now in a township we now own 2,000 acres, and it's just been all of these incremental Bolton acquisitions. Now that has probably more interest from some of the developers on the solar side or for other things too that can be even much higher revenue or value. But we always fall back on if it's just a farm, that's what we underwrote and we're happy with that. And we'll continue to aggregate those properties over time. We have over 500 today.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source