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
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“Property farm rents, CapEx, what type of return do we think we can earn over time? And we're targeting kind of that 8 to 10% net through a cycle on farmland. But then once we own the property, and as you aggregate properties over time, maybe we started with a couple hundred acres.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continue to affirm it. Yeah, on a 700 acre farm, we have one in western Indiana has seven wind turbines. They might take up 20 acres total between the turbine and the roads. The rest of it, we continue to rent. So that rent from those wind turbines, it's incremental. It might increase 20 or 30 basis points over your farm rent. So we'll take it, but it's not going to change your life. When we started doing things like solar, so solar, instead of seeing 20 or 30 basis points, you're seeing on an option period, maybe a three to five X, the income return. Really? So if you think back to we're buying land at a four and a half to five and a half percent income over the course of five years during an option period, if it were to go to solar, now we're generating 15 to 20, 25% annualized income. So we like that. But in that case, it's taking the whole footprint of the land. And if when we buy a farm, we're just underwriting it as an agricultural.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of eight or ten years, just sell them all off. He decided that an evergreen fund really fit the asset class better because most of the farm tenants we're working with, they want to farm this property for 10, 20, 30 years. And that's kind of the way they're thinking in terms of how they grow their business and being able to own the property for that long makes a lot of sense. If you have lessees that want to rent that way, and if you think of who are the ultimate over time, who are going to be the ultimate investors in this asset class, it's going to be folks that have very long dated either goals or liabilities. So endowments, foundations, trust, infrastructure funds, insurance companies. So having this long dated asset where you're not forced to churn or forced to have these transaction costs is really important. And what we found later on too was some of the optionality around farms. So wind has been around for a long time. And that's kind of a mildly incremental increase in revenue.”
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 in some cases, those rights have been severed 100 years ago. And in certain parts of the Midwest and outwest, you don't own mineral rights. We like to own them. It's kind of funny. The family farm I grew up on in northeastern Pennsylvania growing up, no one knew what Marcella Shale was. But everyone in Susquehanna County has made more money pumping gas than they ever did milking cows. And it was really seeing.”
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, you know, investing in the US as a key part of this because the landowner has a lot of rights that in other parts of the world you just don't have. So mineral rights here in the US, the surface owner generally owns them.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rental market's completely inefficient. So there are times that we've bought properties, in some cases, from other institutional investors, and we've doubled the rent on day one, not because we wanted to charge an uneconomic rent, but because the farmer was willing to pay that rent for that land and the active management that the previous owner was using was either not very good or not that active. So that's where we think we do a really good job of just identifying where can we add alpha. And then again, it's not a black box. This is really just ticking and tying and blocking and tackling.”
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, there's no black box here to what we're doing. It's really a blocking and tackling strategy. And we encourage all of our investors when they're contemplating this or even on an annual or biannual basis come out and look at these properties and see what we're doing. And we have folks that have been trading their entire career and they'll come to a farm auction and say, well, you were underwriting the same rent on two properties across the street from each other. One sold for X, one sold for 2x. How does that happen? And it's just who wanted which one and how in some cases or instances the way in which the farm is being sold is inefficient.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that irrigation will help us increase the yield, decrease the risk for the tenant, and it increases our rent. But also, we can capitalize that increased rent into a higher land value over time. So if we can find those opportunities to do the CapEx, that's our bread and butter.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we try to target that four and a half to five and a half percent when we purchase a farm. And that'll come, it'll all come exclusively in terms of rent. That's what we're underwriting. But then the total return will be that mix of rental income and then appreciation over time. And appreciation can be that beta that I referred to that Chicago Fed data that says 6% a year on average. But then there's alpha that we can add. And a lot of that is because the people that are selling farms are usually not active farmers. I mentioned these are estates, trusts, non-farming heirs. And there's some low-hanging fruit in terms of CapEx that a farmland investor can do to decrease the risk of a crop growing and also increase the yield. So a really common thing that we do is add irrigation.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chicago Fed 7th District land trades at 1.5 to 2.5%. And your buyer is typically a neighboring farmer. So that's their strategic investment they're making. And that farmer may take the landowner rental return and their operating return and compress them together to justify whatever price they're paying.”
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 the gross rental yield on our portfolios range between 4% and 5% a year. Now, when you think about, if you look at the index, so there's non-investable indices that are out there, or if you look at the Chicago Fed or some of the large land grant universities, they'll put out a lot of data around what cap rate do farms trade at. Because while there's no Indiana farmland go on Bloomberg yet, there are a lot of public transactions that happen and will attend two to 300 public auctions a year. And there'll be an attorney's offices, VFWs. These are on a random Tuesday night at 6 o'clock, someone's selling 120 acres of farmland. And we track where does this sell versus our reserve price. We know what rent we could earn on that property. So what implied cap rate is land selling at. Generally speaking, in the Midwest and the”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And we've, you know, back when rates were extremely low, a lot of our investors used farmland or used Cirrus as a inflation or a fixed income substitute, something that's positively correlated with inflation, even with rates being higher. I view farmland more as TIPS-like thing. And we haven't seen much appreciation there.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equipment, wages, wages, everything that gets baked into growing that crop inflation plays a part in it. As the landowner, the actual dirt has a very positive correlation with inflation over time. So I'm not going to say we love inflationary environments, but this is an investment that's built for inflationary environments. And the way that we think about how global central banks treat the way they do business, we think we're in an inflationary environment for the long term. So we think this is an asset that works well with 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, so within agriculture, inflation comes two ways. So if you're an operator, if you're a farmer, inflation's real because you're”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In theory, that return should fall to the landowner, or at least a portion of it should fall to the landowner, not just to the operator. So if you're an active manager, we feel like you'll capture some of that. If you're a passive owner of land that doesn't understand, well, what is the land actually producing? What should I be generating in rent? How do I capitalize that into a land value? Maybe you don't. But if you look back over time, that capital appreciation has been about 6%, and it's really just maybe there's been a little bit of cap rate compression, but it's more around gains in productivity and then just CPI inflation.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's total. That's gross. So if you look at what makes up that, it's really just inflation plus gains in productivity. So every time there's new technology, whether it's seed genetics or fertilizer technology or equipment technology, anything that can create more yield on 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
“So, some of that is current income, a positive correlation with inflation, diversification in a portfolio, non-correlation, and then also an appreciating capital asset. So our asset is primarily dirt. So there's a little bit depreciation you can take around things like if there's buildings or grain storage bins or irrigation equipment, but primarily our asset is just dirt and it's appreciating over time. And the reason for that is a few things. The Chicago Fed has data going back almost 70 years that'll say that farmland has averaged about 6% price appreciation during those 70 years on an annualized basis.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, vegetables, annual crops, crops that are planted every year. You rotate as opposed to permanent crops. And really, it's a complete distinction. Permanent crops would be things like wine grapes, pecans, almonds, pistachios, blueberries, things like that where your exposure is not just to dirt, which is what row crops really is. Like our asset is dirt and there's optionality around what you can plant there. Your exposure and permanent crops is more specific to a specific crop. And in some cases, also a very specific variety. So if you had red delicious apples and they're out of favor and people want honeycrisp apples, then while you own apples, you don't own the prime asset. And so we've focused almost exclusively on row crops. And we've done that for a few reasons. One is we think it's much less risk, but it also hits on the investment objectives of farmland, we think more cleanly.”
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 farmland, and I'll focus more on Midwest row crops, but row crops generally are annual crops because there are a few different buckets.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Per spouse. Per spouse. Significantly larger. So any discussion around a reduction in that, which obviously things get being permanent, and I'll use air quotes around permanence because Everything changes, but yeah, that when you have this one significantly large asset, the taxation on that will dictate how they move it sometimes.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are kind of unique time periods of maybe 2012 end of 2012 was an example where there were some new tax things coming up, a higher long-term capital gains tax, the Obamacare investment tax. And there was at least a discussion around that, a state tax exemption being reduced from, I think at the time it was at four and a half or five and a half million per spouse down to a million. So that drove some real behavior at the end of 2012 from people saying we want to sell this before the taxes go up. Usually folks just wait until they get that step up in basis and then they're going to sell it.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going in the big city. Right. And even a lot of what they've already made that decision in some cases a generation ago, but they still own the land. It's been more of not a financial asset, but more like a family asset. And what you tend to see and taxes drive a lot of behavior in every industry. In agriculture, it's pretty meaningful because if you have this one very large real estate asset, people usually wait to get that step up in basis and then they're saying, well, now is the time we're going to sell regardless of market conditions. It's we don't want to pay the tax going back three, four, five generations to a cost basis of nothing. Right.”
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 very, well, it's just not up. There's not a jump ball every year for it. It's all occupied. And even most farmers, and I'll use the Midwest as an example, because growing up in the Northeast, farmland was much different. There wasn't quite as robust a rental market. In the Midwest, which is one of the reasons we've focused on that is there's a very robust rental market. And we want to rent land. So we want not just one or two large farmers who will provide us with a rent indication or a rent bid, we want the opportunity to have 10 or 20 different farmers. And these are all, we work with across the board, 170 different farm tenants today. And all of those farm tenants rent our land. They own land, and they rent a lot of land from other people. So that actually becomes kind of a long-term proprietary deal sourcing network for new acquisitions. So we feel like we are doing the institutional roll-up. If we decided we're only going to do”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, every farm that can be farmed is farmed every year and you lose farmland every year in the US because of things like development and conservation and in parts of California maybe lack of water, aridity that they take farms out of production to transfer water to other properties. So you have this group of or this total pile of farmland in the US that gets smaller every year. You have farmers that understand this is a scale game. They want to grow. So it's an interesting dynamic for investors to come into the space because it's not as if you decided tomorrow, Barry, that you wanted to farm 100,000 acres, you could buy all the equipment, the seed, the fertilizer, the chemicals, and you could find the labor to do all of that. But what you wouldn't find is 100,000 available acres to go.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutional investors today own about 3%. And that includes the largest investors like the Mormon Church, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, groups like Cirrus that might own between a couple hundred million to $3 or $4 billion in assets. But you just don't have these big other groups that own land. It's a very dispersed ownership group made up of estates, trusts, non-farming heirs that have owned this for generations and two or three generations previously they were actively farming the ground. They went to college and did other things, but there's pretty much zero vacancy in U.S. farmland.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Users don't own the land, so the groups like John Deere and Monsanto and Mosaic and ADM, they might either sell into agriculture or buy products out of it. But the land, while it is the true means of production, it's usually owned by others, not these big corporations. So particularly in the Midwest, you'd say the active family farmers, like that farm I grew up on, own about 40% of the real estate.”
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, there's a few things that go into it that just make this market different. And I don't personally think you have to have grown up on a farm to know anything about farmland or agriculture, but it is a very, you know, it's a very people person business because these are the types of properties that we believe you have to rent directly. We don't use just property managers to go out and do it. But in farmland, there hasn't really been an institutional roll-up. So in office and in manufacturing and distribution centers and cold storage, everything's been rolled up over time in the big institutions. And probably the most similar to farmland when you think of what is the underlying asset would be timber. And back 40 years ago, Jeremy Grantam and others started a huge kind of move of taking the end users of timber and handing their assets that they're going to use as part of the end product to investors. But in farmland, the end...”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's cold. Yeah, there was a lot of snow as the moving truck was moving in. But it's been great. And we started to really build that momentum and just being in on the ground floor of a company with a founder who has a vision is you can't ask for anything more.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do is just move back to New York, and now I've got a differentiated thing on my resume. So, you know, we started there. We moved in December of 2010 to South Bend, Indiana. It's not a great weather trade, really. Even in New York, December is not great, but Southbend, it's much worse.”
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, that sounds a lot like what my wife was asking me at the time, too. Why are we doing this and what are we doing? And it was interesting. Perry had 30 million in assets. I think it was 17 million in equity, and we didn't charge on the debt. So he said, I can afford to pay you something. It won't be much, but it'll be something. And I talked to my wife Aaron and said, I think this would be a great opportunity. And she kind of echoed some of the things that people I worked with at Morgan Stanley when they said, well, what do you do if this? Yeah, what do you do if this fails? And of course, no one knew anything about what we were going to do, but they said, well, what if it fails? And I said, well, if it fails, there's two things that give me confidence. One is I'll know it. There's only, you know, it's a very small shop. It's not like some trader in Singapore is going to blow us up overnight. I'll know it's not working. Either the investments are bad or we're not raising money. And the second was there's going to be a great skill set developed here that even if it doesn't work, the worst thing I...”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assets, but he's investing in farmland. And that's how I met our founder, Perry Veith, through my friend Tim Dozel, who's now the CIO of Notre Dame's Endowment, actually, runs the whole shop. And so he's had a very successful career and one of the best decisions, at least from my standpoint, that he made was putting Perry and I in touch.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it definitely started the conversation. And being here in New York, I knew there were very few options for probably investing in agriculture, at least at that time. Even today, we don't recommend it, but there are people in the big city on the coast that invest in farmland. And I had a very close friend from Notre Dame that at the time was running private equity at Notre Dame's endowment. And I had contacted him and said, I'm interviewing with a few of these firms that invest in farmland. So groups like John Hancock and UBS that had existing funds or separate account businesses that would invest in US or global farmland. And I asked him, have you guys underwritten them? Have you invested with them? Have you talked to them? And he was very frank. And he said, generally, we don't think you get paid for the risk involved with investing in land. And the duration that you need to hold it. But he said, let me introduce you to it. There's another Notre Dame guy that he started something really small. He's got very few.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, I did that. I didn't have the time to do the CFA also during that time. But yeah, it was something that was slightly different. I always had interest in commodities and other types of alternatives, not just hedge funds or private equity. So there was, it was just a way to learn a little more and add it to the resume.”
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, not without peril for everyone at that time, but certainly they were able to navigate through in a way that very few were able to do it as successfully as Morgan Stanley was.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I started, it was Phil Purcell, John Mack came shortly thereafter, and then, or came back shortly thereafter. And then during my time there within investment management, James Gorman came over from Merrill to take over.”
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 was an interesting time to be there within investment management. Morgan Stanley had a mandate to really grow that business, especially on the alternative side. So the plan had been to put together a pretty sizable balance sheet by minority stakes and asset managers, maybe take some asset managers like Front Point over completely, and then the great financial crisis happened. And we went from a team that was really given the opportunity to use a balance sheet to, we were told we need to create a balance sheet. So things that we had bought now needed to be sold, and that was really the impetus for the transaction that sold Van Campen and a handful of other Morgan Stanley equity businesses to Invesco. So on that deal, I was actually working more on the sales side of that deal. And when you're selling things, you realize this probably isn't a long-term career strategy. Eventually you run out of things to sell.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit. Yeah, although there are plenty of days in my career now that you get tired of being in in the office and you said, I'd much rather drive around and look at some of our properties and check in on some of our farm tenants.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like in every other asset class where there's 30 or 40 places and everyone has a fund and you just choose where you want to go. There's actually very few people that invest in agriculture exclusively. And so it was kind of stacking that background of valuation and transaction experience and maybe a rekindled interest in agriculture and farmland, not on the actual labor side, but on the investment side. How do you do this outside of just the big boys like John Deere or K-Ih or at the time Monsanto or these big ag companies? How do you do it? So that's kind of how I made that path all the way back around.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, that was here in New York. Yeah, we started training in One World Trade in July of 2001, and we were eventually in Three World Financial Center, and I spent three years at Lehman Brothers and learned a lot of different things, but some of it was, I don't know what I want to do. And I had a friend that had moved to Morgan Stanley, and that's how I made my way shortly thereafter over there and spent six years at Morgan Stanley in various roles. I knew I always wanted to be on the buy side. And everyone dreams of being in private equity and how do you get there? And it's a difficult path. And when you think about what are the things that you could be good at or that you have interest in, that's how I kind of looped back around to this agriculture piece because I had a lot of valuation experience at Morgan Stanley and we worked on a number of transactions and I thought, well, how do I apply this to agriculture?”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Wall Street. That's right. Yeah, when I went to Notre Dame, I just wanted to do something different and I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I actually had a friend in my dorm that I said, what are you majoring in? And he said, well, my dad works at Merrill Lynch, I think, finance. And I said, well, that sounds interesting. And so that's how I started thinking about that and taking Japanese as a freshman at Notre Dame was really more about just doing something different than the Latin and French. I took at my Jesuit high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And they talked to me into doing a study abroad in Japan. And I really fell in love with the country and the culture. And if I had been looking forward instead of reverse, I probably would have taken Chinese or something else. I was looking backwards and continued on with the Japanese and then was lucky enough throughout my career to be able to spend some time there, not full-time, but at least to travel to Japan. And if we ever get to the point that we have Japanese investors 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, before school. Yeah, for us, it'd be about 4 30. And with three brothers, usually there's three jobs on a dairy milking cows, working with equipment and then managing manure. And even though I was the oldest brother, I was really good at the third. So that's what I was 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
“Yeah, it's a great question because growing up on a really active family farm, you learn a lot of things, and one of them was I definitely did not want to be a farmer for the rest of my life. We did real work. I was the oldest of six. And I had great parents who instilled great values with us. But one of those values was the value of hard work. And we spent a lot of time before and after school every day actually running this dairy with our parents.”
2025-11-07 · Masters in Business · Ceres Partners CIO Brandon Zick on How Private Equity Invests in Farmland · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source