MI046: RECESSION-RESISTANT ALTERNATIVE ASSET INVESTING

W/ ARTEM MILINCHUK

24 June 2020

On today’s show, Robert Leonard talks with Artem Milinchuk about investing in an alternative asset class that is not as popular among investors – farmland investing. Artem is the Founder and CEO of FarmTogether, a platform that makes investing in farmland easier and more accessible by the masses. He is also part of the Forbes Finance Council and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • What is farmland investing?
  • Why should you consider adding farmland to your portfolio?
  • How farmland investing compares to other traditional investment classes like stocks and bonds.
  • What are the typical returns for farmland investing?
  • How COVID-19 has impacted agriculture technology, and what we can expect in the future.
  • And much, much more!

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TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Robert Leonard  0:02  

On today’s show, I talked with Artem Milinchuk about investing in an alternative asset class that likely isn’t top of mind for most people: farmland. Artem is the founder and CEO of Farm Together, a platform that makes investing in farmland easier and more accessible by the masses. 

He is also part of the Forbes Finance Council and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. If you enjoy this episode and the type of alternative assets we discussed in the episode today, you can check out more conversations similar to this one on the tip real estate investing podcast. 

You can find the link to the podcast in the show notes below, or by going to theinvestorspodcast.com/realestateinvesting. Be sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast player. Now without further delay, let’s dive into this thought provoking conversation with Artem Milinchuk.

Intro  1:00  

You’re listening to Millennial Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network where your host Robert Leonard interviews successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation. 

Robert Leonard  1:22  

Hey, everyone, welcome to this week’s episode of millennial investing. With me today, I have Artem Milinchuk. Welcome to the show, Artem.

Artem Milinchuk  1:29  

Thank you, Robert, good to be with you.

Robert Leonard  1:31  

Let’s start by talking about your background a bit. How did you get to where you are today?

Artem Milinchuk  1:36  

I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. One thing that we all had in common back in the days was that everyone would get allocated this little patch of land, used to be called patches sometimes because it was the sort of a house there. You would go there almost every summer to plant stuff. At that point, the Soviet Union was getting so poor that you only had the basics in the grocery stores.  

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I like to joke that the United States was not because of its military mind, but because of the food on grocery shelves. And so, that kind of attachment to and very early on working with my grandparents planting the staple potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, all that stuff, then taking care of them for the summer harvesting sort of gave me this very deep appreciation of the reality of land and food.

That was kind of the initial attraction to farming and to food. 

Then growing up, I went into finance and I found it endlessly exciting and interesting investing in finance, how many lives it touches. If done well, it creates tremendous wealth.

If done poorly, it creates tremendous inequality and suffering, frankly. 

Really, for me, marrying finance and food was sort of marrying my two passions. 

I then moved from Russia to Canada in 2007. I did my MBA actually in the US and am working on back to Canada, but the kind of career focus has always been on food and agriculture. And so, it was something that I think has been with me from early on.

Robert Leonard  3:12  

Yeah, it was interesting to hear how you were in the agricultural space first and then made the transition to finance. It’s not one you necessarily hear a lot, but when we hear how you combine the two, as we get through this episode, you’ll hear how that makes a lot of sense. I think it’s really interesting. 

Artem Milinchuk  3:28  

Just to clarify, it was really working on my grandparents’ patches of land, which were boys my age like 6 to 12. I was really young. 

Then straight after high school, I went into undergrad, masters and then started immediately my career in finance. But it’s that sort of early exposure to land that made me focus on food and agriculture being in finance kind of role and finance world already.

Robert Leonard  3:57  

You had a successful career in the finance world. So what inspired you to become an entrepreneur and start Farm Together?

Artem Milinchuk  4:05  

Sometimes I ask the question myself, why not stay in the cushy finance job I had. I think it’s really at the end of the day, it’s what drives a lot of entrepreneurs just a desire to build into something new for all of its attractiveness. 

Then when this is somewhat passive, you give the capital to someone and then you just hope that they do best with it. I still really like investing. I think it’s very intellectually stimulating, but I really wanted to build and it was fortunate that as I was kind of going through the ideas that were coming up in my head, this idea of, “Hey, how come there isn’t a farmland investment platform, right? It’s such a huge market, such an attractive market, so much is happening. How come most people and mostly institutions, most investment managers can not invest into this huge asset class?”

It really just was this gaping hole that make no sense to the point that my level of conviction was so high that I had to do it Even to this day, and sometimes, we have good days, bad days, one unwavering conviction I have is that it is just such an attractive investment that it’s going to happen. We’re making it happen. 

So I would say, desire to build and just conviction that this must exist. I’ll kind of yank it out of non-existence into existence.

Robert Leonard  5:18  

Did you feel like you knew that this idea was going to happen, somebody was going to do it, and you had to be the one to do it? I asked that because you hear that from entrepreneurs all the time, “I had the idea for Uber 10 years ago, or 20 years ago” or whatever the idea or the next tech startup is, people always say, “I had that idea first.”

Did you kind of have that same thought in the back of your mind, “This is going to be happening in the future, and I want to be the one to bring it to fruition”?

Artem Milinchuk  5:45  

If you’re in finance and capital for a very short time, straight away, you learned some very irrefutable laws, capital flows. One of those is that capital investments are always looking for attractive risk adjusted opportunities. Farmland is very attractive. 

So working for a big pension fund, I saw how we would invest in literally crazy deep water mining stuff into literally space satellites that would go and repair other satellites like what Elon Musk is doing now. We’re looking back 10 years ago, and yet, we were not looking literally under our feet. 

And so yes, it was very much like 100% conviction is going to happen. I’d like to be humble here. This space is big. There are the other players and institutional sides as well. I think what I thought I could bring that would be unique, would be sort of the tech enabled, kind of very, if you will, sort of tech driven approach to farmland investing. 

I saw a lot of opportunities to apply technology to kind of create an asset class for the future kind of how Africa skipped landlines and went straight to cell phone lines. And so, I felt compelled to not just start a farmland fund, but really apply what was also rapidly emerging FinTech,Ag tech, AI emerging to farmer investing. That’s where I felt I had that unique sort of intersection of skills and interests.

Robert Leonard  7:07  

Do you think your background in finance has really helped you build the type of platform that farm together is?

Artem Milinchuk  7:13  

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s 50% Ag farming 50% FinTech finance. That’s because on the one hand, you want to invest into great farmers into great land. But you also then need to translate that sort of that into what does it mean from an investment perspective? What does it mean in terms of risk reward in liquidity, other alternatives that people have total portfolio management, meeting people’s financial goals? 

So I think it’s just as important to understand what does farmland mean? There’s definitely a lot of investors that just love that they get to own land that they get to contribute to feeding the planet, but also a lot of investors that say, “Look, I couldn’t care less. What I’m looking for is to meet my financial goals.” 

This is the very first thing, right? Investors are looking at the financial goals, oftentimes, and so you have to then say okay, well farmland in this regard is like real estate. It is in some shape and form like US Treasuries. It is like bonds to some extent because it’s not right now a sort of universal set language and bucket for farmland that you have for stocks, bonds, real estate. And so, I definitely feel a strong need to also educate people on how to think about farmland as a financial as an investment product as well.

Robert Leonard  8:29  

So let’s dive into what exactly is farmland investing because I think like a lot of people listening to the show, I’ve never heard of it or even really thought of it. I’ve never really thought of investing in farmland and I consider myself pretty well versed on the various different types of investment asset classes there are so tell us what exactly does it mean to be investing in farmland?

Artem Milinchuk  8:50  

Robert, I don’t blame you even though I kind of work being exposed to every possible investment opportunity you could see. I only discovered farmland a few years into my career. It is endlessly fascinating. To this day, it blows my mind how the oldest largest asset class literally under our feet, literally providing the most basic necessity we need food and water to a certain extent, somehow feels more exotic than some latest cryptocurrency query. 

And so, what farmland investing is as follows. I was talking earlier about translating that in the language of our investment products. So you can think of farmland as close to being a real estate investment, wanting to know farmland, about 40% of farmland in the United States is rented. So farmers rent land and rent out land. 

It’s a very common practice. It all happens typically between farmers and farmland owners. 

Another thing to know is that almost 97-98% of farmland is owned by families and by individuals. So when we say it’s a nascent untapped asset class, what we mean is that it’s really less than 2% owned by any kind of formalized investors. 

And so, investing into farmland means that you buy a product. One parcel can be a tree at the orchard where you have the trees producing the nuts or can be a cornfield that grows different types of broad crops. As an investor, you typically make your returns from renting out the land to the farmer. Then through a sort of eventual price appreciation that is driven by long term trends in growing population and decreasing supply of farmland. That’s really your return. 

So it’s kind of like a real estate type investment, where you’re leasing or renting out the land. 

Now, where the comparison breaks down a little bit is that you can also be making returns from revenue share, where you take a percentage of the harvest a profit share, when you take a percentage of the profits or even you can have the land being directly operate, where essentially you have farming companies that will operate the land for you. They’ll take a performance fee management fee, but really, you kind of have a lot of control over what’s being farmed. 

In fact, what we’re increasingly seeing is farming families looking to kind of get into that as well, because they get to spread the asset base, the knowledge over larger acreage versus that versus them kind of having to buy that land themselves tying it up, and what is very liquid, perhaps can have lower returning assets. And so, we’re seeing that happen as well. 

But just to recap, investing into farmland is buying a real asset that generates income through typically a rental model.

Robert Leonard  11:20  

Why might someone listening to the show today want to consider investing in farmland? How does your company farm together allow individuals to invest in farmland?

Artem Milinchuk  11:30  

So we have right now thousands of registered users, a large number of them are investors. The main reason is that people have told us why they invest in farmland with us for several reasons. 

One is they’re looking for safety. Farmland has been a great preserve of capital. Historically, the increased farmland index hasn’t had a single negative year since we started monitoring in 1992. So it’s been incredibly resilient. The trends for the growth in farmland prices are quite compelling. 

It’s once again a growing population improving diet and decreasing supply of farmland due to climate change, urbanization, and the disappearance of tiny small cities, as well. 

So farmland has done really well as a means of preserving capital, it has done well in periods of inflation, and in periods of recession. So if you want to do more than just preserve capital, you’re looking for returns as well. Farmland can offer that too. 

Depending on the risk reward profile, whether using debt or not, different types of crops, you can be looking at returns as low as 5-6%. But really good high quality 5-6%, all the way up to 12 to 13, and even 15 and 20%. Plus, in terms of returns. So the returns can also be quite compelling. 

Then lastly, what we hear from people as well. One of the main reasons they invest in farmland is virtually uncorrelated, or negatively correlated to most other asset classes. 

The one example during Q4 2007 to Q4 2009, the entry farmer index, sort of the main farmer index only, was up 23%, while everything else was down 20-50%. So farmland, definitely very resilient, kind of moves in its own trend in its own direction. 

If anything, it is quite counter cyclical. For example, in Q1 2020, farmland actually had the first. The index had the first negative quarter in a long time, but when I said negative, it was down 0.1%. Part of that is book value appraisal. I think we’ll see a rebound of that in Q2, where everything else the stocks were down insane amounts, including real estate, which typically is considered to be not recession resistant. Real estate had the biggest drop. 

We’re not saying farmland is the best investment out there. What we’re saying is that if you’re building a diversified portfolio, a high quality long term portfolio, you should have farmland should have stocks, bonds, real estate, a little bit of gold, a little bit of Bitcoin, maybe, but you definitely should have farmland, it’s such a fundamental nature of our reality, and things should be equally fundamental building block of your portfolio.

Robert Leonard  13:56  

How does your platform farm together make it possible for individuals to invest in farmland?

Artem Milinchuk  14:02  

So what we do is our investment team comes from institutions that have been investing in farmland and Ag for many years who bring that very, kind of very deep institutional knowledge of analyzing farmland. 

We do our sourcing, our analysis, our underwriting, we sift through hundreds of different deals, which was only the best ones, we buy those farms. We actually also find the managers or renters for them. We manage them as well. 

It’s really kind of maybe a comparison, a little bit like Apple where we do everything. That’s because we just feel very strongly about what we want to invest into who we want to work with. 

So a lot of control of our investments and the way you can invest if you go to  farmtogether.com We frequently put out deals. You can read about each deal, each opportunity on the website, listen to the webinar, reunification materials, everything is very simply laid out. 

We talked about what the key risks to consider, what is the projected hold period cash yields, what are the main assumptions and risks involved in this investment. We are looking to roll out secondary liquidity soon. While most deals have a seven, eight year hold period, we’d like the option for people to be able to exit the deal sooner via the secondary market. We have a pilot that is projected to come in September of this year. 

Honestly, you can invest, sometimes in a matter of minutes, everything can be signed electronically, and your tax documents, your payout, your updates, all will be provided via email, as well as through your personal portal on the website.

Typically, we aim for semi annual to annual updates, and as frequent as quarterly. It’s also possible and so user friendly. We’re very proud of our tech team. You truly can become a farmland owner in a matter of minutes and start learning about the space and learning about the farmers. Hopefully, we will see you coming back for more.

Robert Leonard  15:50  

So it sounds like when you explain the platform to me, it sounds like one of those platforms that does other types of real estate. It sounds very similar to what might maybe a Fundrise, or something along those lines, or even Roofstock, or Crowd Street who we also had here on the podcast. It sounds similar. It’s just with a different asset class. Would you agree with that?

Artem Milinchuk  16:12  

I would, to a certain extent, I think where the comparison breaks down a little bit is that a lot of those companies typically have third party sponsors. It’s a company or a group that is raising for a particular project or particular kind of investment, whereas we are the ones who actually source and manage investments. 

There are no other parties involved. If a deal isn’t too good, you don’t need to be, we can’t be pointing fingers at like, “Oh, it’s this sponsor that hasn’t done well.” It’s really another day for us to kind of manage it for you and deliver the returns. So that’s where you have a bit more accountability, a bit more control as well. 

But in terms of the vision and the same mission of democratizing an asset class that previously was inaccessible to most people, very proud and humbled to be in the company of the platforms, you’ve described, no doubt.

Robert Leonard  17:01  

What are some of the other or more traditional ways that people can invest in farmland that might have existed before your platform or even today?

Artem Milinchuk  17:11  

Before us, there were two and our two public REITs public stocks that give you exposure to farmland. They’re large and they typically are looking for a more passive type of return. Because of the size, as you go up in size and the complexity, the returns tend to go a little bit lower. You also have to consider public listing fees that the companies have recording fees, and having no control over what amount of debt and other deals the company buys. 

So it’s kind of like you’re buying into a portfolio, and then you kind of hope that this portfolio will be managed well, and so definitely, there’s been volatility in some of those stocks that you wouldn’t have sort of expected looking just farmland, but still kind of like those companies. 

For example, permanent crop space has been around for many years and has done a tremendous job democratizing the asset class. The more traditional ways for large investors have been investment funds, private funds, those typically have limited diversification except the largest ones. The large ones, the minimum check sizes start from $10-100 million crops, really hard to get into. 

So I would say that in terms of the platforms that give you different opportunities, allow you that flexibility, low check sizes, Farm Together is looking to become the go to for those types of investors.

But having said that, there is a big space. I’m sure that there’ll be more players coming, which is always good. There’s some other players out there. Our goal is to deliver excellent returns to investors, not to kind of beat someone else. It’s a big space, it’s a blue ocean, it’s 2.5 trillion United States. So we just put our heads down. We try to get the best deals, manage them to the best of our abilities and deliver good returns.

Of course, we benchmark because we do want to be the best. But I guess my point is that most of our time is spent thinking about how to get the best deals, not who else is doing what

Robert Leonard  19:12  

You mentioned in the US it’s a $2 trillion market. Are there opportunities to invest in farmland outside of the US? And if so, are those more risky just given maybe the environment and maybe they’re not as much run like a business or is it really just us focus?

Artem Milinchuk  19:29  

The US is, in my view, the best geography just because of the tremendously solid rights of ownership, very large markets and developed infrastructure and some of the most innovative and productive farmers. There is a lot to like in the United States and us focusing mainly on US investors. It’s easy to match US farmers, US farmland to US dollars, US capital and of keeping it domestic. 

Having said that, there’s definitely a case to be made. We actually make the case that investing in farmland should be at some point global where you want to have exposure to Canadian farmland to may be an Australian part of life. That’s because there’s just more and more food. You have different climates, different political regimes, as well as a trade war with China. So, the US suffers. 

So we definitely see in the future a more global offering as well. But just to reiterate, I think we’ll be in the US for quite a little while. Out of the 9 trillion global farmer market, the US is 2.5 trillion, by far the largest.

Robert Leonard  20:31  

When you think of companies like say, Beyond Meat, who are creating a meatless meat product, and just other advancements in technology that we’re seeing across the world, do you see these advancements in technologies and new foods that are being created negatively impacting investing in farmland over the long term?

Artem Milinchuk  20:48  

No, not really. I think certain parts of farmland will be repurposed. If we’re eating less meat, you need less pasture land. But you still have this relentless growth in population and the diets keep improving. 

When you think about the diet of someone who’s living in an emerging market versus in the developed market, the gap is still very big. Then when you start thinking also about deserving people, organic produce typically has lower yields than you know, the last one we make in types of food and maybe shifting of guides. 

Meatless meat plays a role, of course, but the overarching trend is still too powerful for that to make a truly meaningful dent in the trends of farming practices. But it’s definitely something that when you start kind of diving deeper into segments.

For example, Beyond Meat, if I’m not mistaken, is pretty big on chickpeas. And so, that market has been growing, right? So you could be positioned right investing into the chickpea farms quite well. I think, as with everything, these locations and pockets of the market will experience lower returns from dairy and have been struggling for a while now. 

For example, at the same time elements continue growing. So we’ll look for that. We look at what are the segments, geographies, crops that have those tailwinds and which have headwinds. That’s why for example, as of right now, we’re not in any kind of pasture land that they need in the meat kind of market. So we don’t do anything around animal husbandry and things like that. It’s all focused on cropland and on crops. 

Robert Leonard  22:17  

How does investing in farmland compare to traditional investment asset classes, like say, stocks, bonds, or even mutual funds?

Artem Milinchuk  22:26  

You see, you have lower correlation, as I mentioned, to most of the asset classes, you also have right now pure, it’s a less developed infrastructure, and better financial investment market in general. Investing stocks and bonds, you just have so many options. 

In farmland, it’s really, very few ways for now. Right now you also still have to have a pretty long time horizon of typically 5 to 10 years, because there isn’t that much liquidity yet. Informal investments and investment products, it’s something that we’re actually working on and looking to change. But right now, we’re to take a longer term view on your investments.

Robert Leonard  23:06  

How does it fit into the universe outside of those traditional investment asset classes? How does it fit into the universe of other alternative asset classes like real estate, other real assets like gold? How do you get someone interested in an asset class like farmland over say, gold or Bitcoin or just high flying tech stocks?

Artem Milinchuk  23:26  

So it’s actually we often call formulas like gold with a coupon or Bitcoin, digital gold, because it has a very strong kind of intrinsic value and preservation of capital, especially in high inflation environments. That actually has drawn quite a few of those gold, Bitcoin type investors, thinking about other alternative investments, we come back to solely good return, especially the long term and diversification, lack of correlation. 

When you’re thinking about your portfolio returns over 10 to 30 years, it seems very obvious that it’s important to have some farmland in your portfolio alongside those high tech stocks, real estate and other asset classes. 

Then lastly, because farmland is as of yet unknown, untapped, and uninvested by most people, that’s where we think you can find the best investment opportunities because best investment opportunities are where no one’s looking. So we do see opportunities also and quite interesting returns in that 15-20% plus range in farmland. You have to take on a bit more risk, but you’re looking at compelling deals. 

Oftentimes, investments that once sort of done and developed can be yielding 10% cash flow for quite a bit of time. We’re talking 10 to 30 years, some of those trees produce for longer than that. And so, for people who are looking to sort of match the expenses with cash flow, that is something that is not that easy to find in the market, especially if it is uncorrelated to almost anything else.

Robert Leonard  24:57  

Are you seeing any major professional money managers like hedge funds and endowment funds investing in the farmland space?

Artem Milinchuk  25:05  

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re seeing pension funds, everything for everyone from paid in pension funds to a place like Illinois, California and pension funds as well as global investment funds, impact funds, foundations investing. 

Some of the most notable names would be Veen or Prudential, UBS, and more and more players entering the space. There are some well known billionaire names. There is a kind of widely known but unconfirmed understanding that the Bill Gates Foundation owns a lot of farmland. So yeah, definitely, it’s an asset class that has attracted some of the best and brightest. I think Warren Buffett, one of his favorite investments, is being invested in farms. It’s kind of exotic, but at the same time, it’s not. Some of the best investors in the world are actively working capital to this asset class.

Robert Leonard  25:56  

Yeah, it’s an interesting dynamic, because it kind of is exotic, but it’s also simple. Farmland, it’s not a crazy, high flying tech company or a super difficult company to understand like Bitcoin, right?

Artem Milinchuk  26:08  

Most people cannot explain how Bitcoin works.

Robert Leonard  26:11  

Exactly, exactly. So it’s simple to understand, but it is kind of an exotic asset class, if you will. 

You mentioned some of the big names that may or may not be in this space. And I find that really interesting. But why don’t you think more people are talking about investing in farmland? Do you think that that’s going to change in the future?

Artem Milinchuk  26:27  

Oh, yeah. 100% already versus when we started two years ago. It’s changing meaningfully. We were very fortunate to be a part of that conversation. I think what we are going to see after this crisis is that same as last time, 2008 to 2009, that gave explosion to what alternatives are going to be the same where everyone from 2009-2010 to today, stocks generally would go up and you kind of put your money in the S&P 500 and never worry about. 

As things go, we had this big jolt and awakening and people realizing that look, first of all, stocks can easily lose 30-50%. If you’re levered in the stock market, lose everything. Then secondly, even today, we’re talking to clients every day. Some of them are saying this market is crazy. It’s overvalued. We want to put it into something that is real, and that will protect us against versus we’ll have less money printing. 

So I think every time we go into a kind of a crisis or recession, a bit of a down market, people remember that it’s important to diversify. You cannot have just crazy growth every year in the S&P and stock markets.That I think will drive a lot of the conversation. 

Another part that I want to mention, though, is that something we’re very passionate about is working to help farmland be part of the climate change solution. The broad sort of movement there is called regenerative agriculture which replenishes soil and has the potential to recapture carbon in the soil. 

If you start kind of crunching numbers, looking at it, agriculture could be not just carbon neutral, carbon negative, becoming carbon sink, while also enriching the soil. So there’s a lot of people, a lot organizations *inaudible* looking into making soil also work for climate change. 

Additionally, given how ESG impact investing is becoming more and more important, it’s quite nice to have what we call greenwashing, being something that is absolutely necessary and required by a lot of investors. We see that adding a lot to the conversation as well as farmers becoming more and more known. That’s what we see firsthand with our investors.

Some investors call somebody to say, “I only want to see a regenerative farm deal or a regenerative offering, give that to me.” So I think that will be once we kind of get back to talking about climate change. I think there’ll be a big part of increasing interest in farmland as well.

Robert Leonard  28:43  

How has COVID-19 impacted you and your business as an entrepreneur, and how has it impacted agriculture and just farmland investing in general?

Artem Milinchuk  28:54  

COVID definitely was a big wake up call for a lot of investors. We had a big influx of investors looking to deploy the capital into safe and stable assets and protect themselves against what some see as sort of inevitable Inflation due to fed printing. So overall, I think it’s been kind of a big positive for us in terms of influx of investors.

Robert Leonard  29:16  

What long term investment trends do you see emerging after COVID-19?

Artem Milinchuk  29:22  

Obviously, remote working can be huge. I think we’re going to see a breakdown and globalization that started already before COVID. The tensions with China, I think will just continue deepening, so more trends around localization, bringing manufacturing back to us. 

Then I’d say we’ll continue to see an increase in demand for regenerative, sustainable climate change isn’t going away, as well as people’s desire to eat healthier isn’t going away or beyond that, hard to tell. We keep our heads down, focus on farmlands. I don’t have a lot of thought beyond that.

Robert Leonard  29:59  

In general, you’ve alluded to it so far throughout the episode, but what makes farmland historically a stable investment? Why will it remain stable during and post COVID-19? 

Artem Milinchuk  30:11  

The stability is a function of stability of any asset class. Investment is a function of its predictability, right? You get volatility, when you don’t know what the asset is actually worse. That’s why you have Bitcoin and Tesla going all over the place, because you can draw wildly different scenarios of what those investments actually mean.

For farmland, you don’t have that because you know exactly what it means. It can grow between this much and this much food in any given year. You have a really good sense of that, because it’s a function of soil or climate fertilizers. You have a good sense of what the price of that food may be, might be higher, particularly on the lower. 

But overall, everything that farmers produce has been consumed for literally 1000s of years ago. It’s not like there’s a lot of uncertainty, as much uncertainty around pharma as a lot of other investments. 

Because of that, that’s why it’s been less volatile, and has less risk, if you will. Then pre and post COVID-19, I think we’ve seen a small minus 0.1, or something like that percent decrease in the foreign index. 

I think after COVID, my sense is we’re going to see continued increase in interest in pharma, which should lead to increases in prices. But once again, I want to caution that a this is just our view and be within a family of different segments, different geographies, they don’t all behave more generously, you will have *inaudible* movements, for sure. 

Overall, I think COVID-19 will increase the interest in the same asset class as well as interesting and more local sources of food. It will play well for some crops in the US. It might be challenging for some other crops that are more export dependent. We’ll look at that and think about that. But I think overall, definitely increased interest in the farmer for sure.

Robert Leonard  31:57  

I know this conversation has been super interesting for me. It really opened my eyes to an asset class that I had never considered before. I don’t think many other people have. So I think the audience is going to really enjoy this episode. I think it’s going to really open a lot of people’s eyes to just how many different asset classes are becoming available, not only because of technology, but also because of entrepreneurs like yourself. 

Artem, for those that want to connect with you further, or learn more about investing with Farm Together where should they go? 

Artem Milinchuk  32:27  

Thank you, Robert, that was great to be on your podcast. FarmTogether.com. We have tons of information, they’re really working hard to make it accessible in different formats, easy to understand. Then secondly, email us at info@FarmTogether.com. We read every email, so don’t worry. It literally goes to me. It goes to investment team client teams. We will make sure to reply.

Robert Leonard  32:59  

As always, I’ll put links in the show notes. Artem, thanks so much for joining me.

Artem Milinchuk  33:13  

Thank you so much, Robert.

Robert Leonard  33:15  

Alright guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro  33:21  

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