Farmland investing has a quiet track record that almost nothing else in finance can match. Actual productive land has appreciated through wars, hyperinflations, and recessions, which is exactly why Dan Ferris and Ron Paul build their “Crack-Up Boom” pitch on it. The idea is sound. The question is how to own it, because “own farmland” sounds simple but turns out to have a menu of options, and the one the pitch recommends is not necessarily the one that delivers the pitch’s promises.
The Menu of Ways to Own Farmland
There are four main routes. You can buy land directly, which gives you the asset itself but requires capital, expertise, and a willingness to deal with tenants, weather, and crop prices. You can invest through a private farmland fund, the route institutions use, which delivers the cleanest exposure but locks your money up for years. You can buy a public REIT, which trades like a stock and pays dividends but brings stock-market volatility along with it. Or you can buy a farmland-adjacent ETF or a diversified real estate fund, which is the broadest but also the most diluted version of the bet.
The “Crack-Up Boom” pitch chooses the public REIT route, specifically Gladstone Land (LAND) and Farmland Partners (FPI), the only two REITs that specialize in farmland. The appeal is obvious. A REIT is the “easier to own than at any time in history” version of the asset, liquid, dividend-paying, and accessible in any brokerage account.
What the Pitch Gets Right
The core thesis is historically solid. Barton Biggs documented in Wealth, War & Wisdom that families holding productive land survived the Weimar hyperinflation and the world wars while savers in cash were wiped out. People always need to eat, so land that grows food holds purchasing power across generations. The pitch’s headline figure, “up over 1,700% over the long term, without a single down year in decades,” is a real number describing actual farmland values.
The structure of the recommendation is also reasonable. Farmland is genuinely uncorrelated with stocks and bonds over long stretches, and it is a real inflation hedge, since both land prices and crop rents rise with the price level. If you believe a currency crisis is coming, this is a defensible place to park a slice of a portfolio.
What the Pitch Gets Wrong
The mismatch is between the asset and the vehicle. The 1,700 percent number describes the price of the dirt itself. It does not describe Gladstone Land or Farmland Partners, both of which have delivered poor shareholder returns since inception, small, rate-sensitive, and caught between farm operating costs and the recent squeeze on all real estate. The pitch sells you the asset class’s record while handing you the two vehicles that have not captured it, which we broke down in our farmland REIT explainer.
There is also no performance accountability anywhere in the presentation. Every pick is marked “N/A” for last close and change, and the pitch concedes “anybody who gives you a date is lying to you,” so there is no clock against which the farmland bet can ever be scored. That is honest, but it also means you are buying a belief, not a backtest.
Who Actually Owns Farmland
Most American farmland is not owned by farmers alone. A large and growing share sits in institutional hands, pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies that discovered decades ago that land rents and land appreciation compound quietly through every cycle. The pitch is, in effect, offering retail investors a seat at a table that institutions have occupied for a long time, and that is a legitimate appeal. Farmland has been an institution-grade asset for decades precisely because it is uncorrelated and inflation-resistant.
The complication is that institutions mostly own farmland directly, not through the public REITs, and that is the gap the pitch glides over. A pension fund buys the actual acreage and collects the rent. The retail investor buying Gladstone Land or Farmland Partners is buying a stock that happens to own farmland, with all the market noise and interest-rate sensitivity that comes with it. The asset is the same. The wrapper is not, and the institutional track record does not automatically transfer to the ticker.
The Honest Bottom Line
Farmland is a legitimate asset class with a superb historical record, and the pitch deserves credit for putting it in front of ordinary investors. The honest caveat is that the public REIT wrapper is the weakest version of the idea, a way to hold farmland exposure that has, so far, delivered far less than the dirt beneath it. We profiled the two REITs individually in our Gladstone Land stock piece and our Farmland Partners stock piece, and placed the whole thing in context in our hard assets explainer.
The offer is The Ferris Report at $129 for the first year, renewing at $199, with a 30-day refund and a seven-stock “Capitalism in Crisis Portfolio.” The farmland idea is one of the better things in the pitch. Just know whether you are buying the land or the stock.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Crack-Up Boom presentation.
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