How Farmland LP is combining science, sustainability, and strategy to rebuild American agriculture
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Show Notes:
In this episode of Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Craig Wichner, Founder and Managing Partner at Farmland LP, to explore how regenerative farming can be both profitable and planet-friendly. Craig explains how his firm converts conventional farmland into high-yield, organic assets—benefiting farmers, investors, and future generations alike.
About Craig Wichner
Craig is responsible for day-to-day management, business strategy and all investment activity. An experienced technology and real estate investor, Craig has helped build numerous companies over the past 30 years. But it was his work on California farms as a teenager that ultimately inspired him to start Farmland LP. Craig’s mission has not changed since day one – prove that regenerative farming is more profitable and maximizes returns for investors.
About Farmland LP
Farmland LP acquires conventional farmland, converts it to certified organic, and builds long-term value by implementing sustainable farming practices. They currently manage over 18,000 acres of farmland in Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. Their funds give investors the opportunity to own high-quality farmland that delivers positive financial, social, and environmental returns. Their latest fund, Vital Farmland Fund III, is now open to accredited investors.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BER Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Craig Wichner, and he is founder and managing partner over at.
Farmland lp. This episode is part of our Milken Global conference series where we feature some of the top guests, participants, panelist, speakers, and attendees of the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, and Craig. Hey, first off, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Great to speak with you.
All right, so we got a lot to talk about here today. So I want regenerative farming better for people, profits, and the planet can’t beat that. And I want to get further into what you’re doing over at Farmland lp. So just to get us kicked off here, , what got you into the regenerative farming space?
like, how’d that start for you? Great. So I grew up spending 10 summer was . On a farm. But also. Loved science, loved business. Had a good business career. And really around the time that my daughter was born, I was a little bit of a late dad had had kids in my late thirties.
And it really, I think being a parent changes your brain. You really stop thinking about yourself and really think about your kids also really what you’re doing for the world. And. Having my daughter really put me on this kind of two year trek of looking at what was I really doing to make a difference in the world.
, I wasn’t happy with how the environment was going with the world, basically. Mm-hmm. That we were leaving for our kids. And was also concerned about the economy. At that time, it was around 2009, so we’d had a crash and there were credit issues and I was a investor in private equity and real assets.
And really just wanted to get away from debt, wanted to, what was it? Ultimately I was looking at buying some farmland for myself. Mm-hmm. And because I have a degree in biological sciences. I knew that managing farmland focusing on healthy soil biology was actually gonna be a better way of managing farmland.
I. Mm. And so I have geeky friends and I’m a geek. Mm-hmm. So did a tremendous amount of kind of research on that. Went up to Oregon to look at buying farmland for ourselves, and really saw that farmland was this wonderful asset. Was generally used to grow low value commodity crops. And that I saw that if we converted it over to organic regenerative agriculture that it would actually be a better way of managing this farmland.
We could actually increase the returns on this farmland and. Really after this week long road trip on the drive home I crafted farmland lp, it basically realized that me buying, me, buying farmland myself, I would need at least $10 million worth of farmland to make it profitable if I drove the tractor, which isn’t mm-hmm.
A great idea for me. Mm-hmm. Or 50 or your daughter, or 50 million. Exactly or $50 million worth of farmland if we were gonna get the cost structure down to kind of a private equity level. And so I don’t have that. So but I know how to create private equity funds and, build businesses and so on that drive home really created farmland, LP right then.
And I’ve been working on it full-time ever since. It’s been over 15 years now. Wow. What an amazing story. And I guess just to go further into the nuts and bolts of it, what differentiates regenerative farming from conventional farming? Like, can you maybe give us a shed some light on that?
Great question. So kind of conventional or industrial agriculture is really focused on chemistry and mm-hmm. Regenerative agriculture is focused on biology. You obviously need to get the chemistry right mm-hmm. For healthy soils, but really focusing on the biology side. Has a tremendous amount of benefits.
, The conventional industrial agriculture system was really developed back in the 1950s. When and the whole system basically continues up until today, I. And it’s really based on wartime technology. So ammonium nitrate is an explosive that they pack in the shells and in bombs.
And after the war, they had these ammonium nitrate factories that didn’t. Have sales anymore. But they realized that if they sold it to farmers and put it on farmland, it was nitrogen, it would actually cause the plants to grow faster. Mm-hmm. And so when you start doing that, then you’re also fertilizing the weeds.
Well, they had herbicides like agent Orange and things like that. So they were able to spread those chemistry, those chemicals as well. They also had a lot of insects. When you start growing. Mono crops of corn. Then you start feeding all the bugs that eat corn. And after two or three seasons, you have tens of millions of bugs that eat your crops.
So you need to spray them. Well, they had mustard gas from World War I and, other toxins from later on. And so they basically just applied all this wartime technology and wartime infrastructure to farmland. And that is the, essentially the agricultural model that we have today. Plant fence, post defense, post get big or get out.
That’s, literally the agricultural policy that we have in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. And using all of these. Chemicals. Well, farmland is a biological system. It’s part of the ecology. You want healthy plants that grow well, that produce great yields and produce great tasting fruit.
And I personally don’t want to eat or feed my kids crops that have a lot of pesticides or herbicides on them. And it’s actually a better form of agriculture. Just takes it’s more complex. Takes more time to convert over to it, but it really has a lot of rewards. And so we set up farmland, LP specifically to buy high quality farmland with great water rights and convert it from that old chemical system to a healthy biology based system.
And then bring in multiple farmers at scale to farm these crops in wonderful regenerative agriculture rotations. Hmm. Obviously I know you come from the money space. So private equity, so go, a little bit more into like why this is maybe not just good for the planet, but it’s good for profits.
Like it’s, good business, It’s really important for you know, basically either you’re a charity and you’re raising charitable dollars. Yeah. Which is essentially kind of less than 2% of the economy. Or if you want to make a change then you want to actually have a, business model that’s, that’s beneficial all the way around.
And what, so we basically set out to demonstrate, to prove that organic regenerative agriculture was more profitable than chemical dependent commodity agriculture. , And we’ve done that now. And so one of the things that we’ve shown, so when, when you convert from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture, you’re able to access the price premiums for organic goods.
You’re also switching from industrial corn, which might. Get sold for ethanol or feedlots into organic vegetables or organic blueberries or other, other high value crops that people actually want. You’re producing more value per acre of land. Mm-hmm. And when you produce more value per acre, per land, both the farmers make more money and our investment fund makes more money to make it very specific.
We’ve demonstrated that we’re buying farmland that previously grew commodity crops generating rents of $300 an acre. When we take it through that three year organic conversion process we get rents of $775 per acre. Mm-hmm. So a very nice step up in cash flow. The farmers are more profitable and so are our investors.
Also benefits land values as well. Hmm. What is, as you’ve gone through this and I’ll use this word, but you’ve been, you know, evangelizing or just, or, you know, really spreading this, so you’ve been 15 years in I heard that, right? Like, you’ve been doing this for a while. So yeah, that’s right.
What, what’s been kind of the response to this approach that you’re taking? Like, how receptive is the, , I don’t know if I should be asking the farming community, the community centered around farming or just in general? So not, not picking on one particular group, but what’s been the response.
To like to this approach and to, what you’re out there, you know, selling. That’s great. Well to start with the farmers usually the neighbors, when we’re, buying farmland the neighbors see us start to go through the organic conversion process. They’re, pretty darn skeptical.
They tend, they, I, there’s a for record man. You think about like how the farmers have it. It’s from way back when they should be. They’re the last skeptic ones. I’m a fan. Go ahead. I had to just throw that out there. I would be too, I’d be like, who’s this guy coming over here trying to tell us how to do what we do?
Go ahead. I’m sorry that that No, it, is exactly right, which is why we we’re not in the. evangelizing business. Like we really, I needed a better word, had the land, I needed a better word. I couldn’t come up with it. Go ahead. No, it’s great. , And really , when we buy a piece of farmland, we really just kind of keep our heads down.
And we just do our work. And initially the farmers are like, why is all that strange stuff growing on that? Why are you bringing in sheep and cattle on land? We haven’t seen those here in 50 years. Organic, organic doesn’t work. Everybody knows that. And then, but after after a few years then, , we had one neighbor farmer come over and says well, what’s that? What is that cover crop mix you’re using over there? That looks pretty good. So after a while when they see the system. It’s a new system. Well, it’s also an old system, 250 years old the, like the four field crop rotation model essentially.
But yeah, so the farmers are skeptical until they see it working year after year. And typically the, the older farmers they’re continuing to do what they do. But their kids are generally very interested in organic and regenerative agriculture. Mm-hmm. It’s just hard to take farmland through that three year conversion period.
So us buying the farmland, us taking it through that three year conversion period and mapping out the crop rotations that allows a former conventional tomato farmer for example to rent some organic land for us to grow organic tomatoes. And really kind of stick their toe in the water, have great experience, getting great economics from growing organic tomatoes.
And then they, then it just starts snowballing. And in fact you know, o one of our largest farmers is actually a, he started out as a 30-year-old kid of one of our other. One of the previous farmers who had, who had been on our land and helped us transition, we paid him to transition the land.
But the, the kid was someone who came in and did exactly that, started growing organic tomatoes the same way he had grown conventional tomatoes just using organic materials. Was very successful. And now he’s one of our largest tenants leasing over a thousand acres of land from us each year and, , very successful and very profitable.
So, so those farmers do convert. It just takes some time. Consumers there’s incredible demand for organic. Food. So about 6% of the US food budget is spent on organic food. That’s about $65 billion a year. It’s a very major. Sector and like Costco sells about 10% of the organic food in the us.
And their CEO says that they can’t get enough organic supply to keep their shelves stocked day after day. So that organic market would actually be larger if there was more organic food. You need organic farmland in order to grow the organic food, and that’s, that’s the problem that we’re helping to solve.
Hmm. I wanna let, shifting focus slightly here talking about trade and labor policies and, the effects they’re having on farming operations, food security, I mean food prices. what kind of impact do these, the shifting trends kind of have, like in your space? In, in our specific space for the organic sector there’s most organic food is actually grown in the us mm-hmm.
And consumed in the us. So less than 1% of organic food is exported and only about 7% of high value fruits and vegetables organic are imported. So actually when the tariffs go up it actually makes our domestic market a little bit larger on that standpoint. So we’re actually really insulated from that kind of stuff.
The rest of the agricultural system is really dependent on labor policy and imports. People estimate somewhere between 40 and 60% of domestic. Labor in agriculture is immigrant, immigrant or either, either legal or illegal immigrant labor. And that’s really being scared off.
We’re very not only do we have good legal labor. We have nice year round labor as well because our organic and regenerative systems actually require people working all year long. It’s very efficient, so we’re able to give our people healthcare benefits and other things like that. The other thing that our scale allows us to do, so we manage over $300 million worth of farmland in the us about 20,000 acres.
And we are really able to lean into automation and mechanization. So where normally you might have a hundred people harvesting blueberries we can actually serve that with four people on a blueberry harvesting machine. Mm-hmm. So , as you get to better scales, you get, mm-hmm.
Much more efficiencies as well. Hmm. I’ll tell you, this has been, I’m getting geared up here. Just so you know, Craig, I don’t know if you know much about our involvement at Mission Matters when it comes to farming or things like that, but I’ll be next week heading to the Texas FSA convention.
This will be my fourth year in a row. And , love. Going out there and supporting the FFA and when I do a bunch of interviews on site with the members, so the young adults that make up the organization and I’m gonna be talking about farming. So it’s fun to be, I learn so much every year I go to that.
So it’s fun. It’s. To me it’s our future, our next generation is secure. And these kids, man, I’ll tell you that they’re absolutely, I shouldn’t say kids members, young adults. They’re absolutely amazing. So , , I have some new some new things to bring up. It’s good. You know,, the young people in agriculture, they’re so important.
And the existing, there’s about $4 trillion worth of farmland in the us mm-hmm. And that’s about the same economic value as all the apartment buildings in the us. And all the office buildings in the us Wow. It’s a lot of value. And most of that is owned by so about 40% is owned by absentee landlords, and 60% is owned by existing farmers, but the average age of farmers is almost 60 years old.
So. That, young farmer getting access to farmland is a really big challenge. And most of those young farmers are actually really interested in organic and regenerative agriculture, and I. It’s incredibly hard for them to get access to organic farmland. Usually the larger businesses who are already successful in organic are the ones who convert their own farmland.
, It’s very hard for a young farmer to get access to enough farmland and then be able to take it through that three year conversion period. So that’s one of the things that’s actually important to us, is creating opportunities to that next generation of of farmer. ’cause that’s what’s gonna determine.
Agriculture for the next 50 and a hundred years is what kind of farmers are farming, you know, what are the farmers, how are those farmers farming that land? Yeah, that’s great Craig. If somebody wants to follow up, learn more, how do they do that? Great. They can come visit us at farmland lp.com.
And we reach out on the contact form and we’re glad to glad to connect with them. Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking to the audience. If this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Craig, man, again, this has been so much fun. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for the work you do.
Great talking to you, Adam. This was great.
