AcreTrader Celebrates 100th Farm Funded Through Platform
Last week marked the 100th property to pass through the AcreTrader farmland investing platform with the full subscription of Prairie Green Farm. We’re taking a moment to celebrate and reflect on the people and land that make our business possible.
Prairie Green Farm is a corn and soybean farm in Iroquois County, Illinois.
Like many of the properties that appear on our platform, Prairie Green Farm is located in an area that is very rural—but agriculturally significant.
It’s currently leased to the local farmer who was operating on the land up to the time of its appearance on the platform. This tenant was highly motivated to stay on the land, and we were able to work with him to adapt his lease to achieve a beneficial outcome for both him and our investors.
This farm also came with a strong, above average production history. Due to the absence of drainage infrastructure, however, its yields haven’t been optimally consistent from year to year.
Our capital raise included a budgetary allocation to add the farm’s needed drainage tile. The goal is to balance out annual yields to ultimately leave the farm more consistently high-producing, which should boost both the farmer’s bottom line and investors’ long term land value.
That’s just the story of a single farm.
Every offering that appears on the AcreTrader platform emerges from a situation as unique as this one. Not only does each parcel have its own important agricultural qualities, each represents a farmer, a business, a family.
Every life in the U.S. and around the world is touched by agriculture. In fact, that’s where AcreTrader originated: in the early upbringing of our founders on Arkansas farmland. Some of our earliest offerings were Arkansas farms growing rice and soybeans.
“Not only does this mean thousands of hours of research and review by our team members, it means we’ve partnered with farmers like Jim Jackson from Washington, the Fitzgerald family in Minnesota, and the Aqua Ceres team in Australia,” said AcreTrader founder and CEO, Carter Malloy.
“We’re proud to provide investors with opportunities to diversify their portfolios and make farmland investing more common, transparent, and easy through our platform. I’m excited to celebrate this landmark with our team and keep working hard to benefit our farmers and investors.”
As of this date, over 26,000 acres’ worth of farmland in 17 U.S. states and Australia have been funded through the platform.
Those acres represent around 30 commodity types, from the corn and soybeans that constitute close to 70% of all U.S. cropland to the apples, wine grapes, olives, and other permanent crops many of us enjoy on a regular basis. Many of these farms are USDA certified organic or moving toward certification.
“It is an incredible privilege that so many farmers across so many regions and markets have trusted us to help facilitate the growth of their operations,” said Rob Moore, Investment Manager – Row Crops. “We’re humbled by the number of success stories over the past three years.”
“We’re also acutely aware that our business’s success is synonymous with our farmers’ and investors’ success, and we’re proud of the weight of that responsibility.”
For AcreTrader, this milestone is an opportunity to reiterate our commitment to honesty and transparency with every farmer and investor we work with.
AcreTrader exists because we’re passionate about the people who work in and care about agriculture. We will continue our efforts to create opportunities for connection between farmers with big ideas and the capital they need to succeed.
To learn more about how farmers partner with us to expand their businesses, visit our For Farmers page.
