The farmland sleeve is the emotional core of the “Crack-Up Boom” pitch. Dan Ferris and Ron Paul point to the “one asset that protected families in Weimar Germany,” and the logic is hard to argue with: people always need to eat, so land that grows food should hold purchasing power across generations. The pitch then translates that idea into something “easier to own than at any time in history,” the publicly traded farmland REIT. There are exactly two of them that specialize in it, Gladstone Land (LAND) and Farmland Partners (FPI), and the honest story of both is more complicated than the pitch lets on.
The Two Farmland REITs
Gladstone Land is the larger of the two by acres, owning roughly 100,000 acres of specialty and value-added agriculture, orchards, vineyards, and other high-value crops that command premium rents. It trades around $7.42 and carries a market cap of about $320 million. Farmland Partners owns about 70,000 acres, mostly row-crop land planted with corn, soybeans, and wheat, plus some specialty parcels it has leased out for solar. It trades around $8.58 with a market cap near $360 million.
Both are real operating businesses with genuine land portfolios, and both are, by design, the public answer to the question “how do I own farmland without buying a farm.” That convenience is the honest appeal. A REIT lets an investor hold productive land in a brokerage account, collect rental income as dividends, and sell in a click rather than a months-long land closing.
Why the Claim Does Not Transfer
The pitch’s headline number is “up over 1,700% over the long term, without a single down year in decades.” That figure is real, but it describes an NCREIF-style index of actual farmland values, the price of the dirt itself. It does not describe the two REITs being recommended. Gladstone Land and Farmland Partners have delivered poor shareholder returns since inception, caught between rising farm operating costs and, more recently, the rate squeeze that has hit all real estate.
That is the central mismatch of the sleeve. The presentation sells you the asset class’s pristine historical record while handing you a vehicle that has not captured it. Farmland itself has been a superb inflation hedge. The publicly traded wrapper has been, by any honest measure, a disappointing way to own it, small, rate-sensitive, and punished whenever borrowing costs rise. We expanded on this in our farmland stocks explainer.
The Honest Case for Each
None of this makes either REIT worthless. Gladstone Land’s specialty-crop focus gives it higher rents per acre, and Farmland Partners’ row-crop portfolio is a more direct play on broad commodity food prices, with the added wrinkle that some of its land is now earning solar lease income. Both pay dividends, both are legitimate businesses, and both would benefit if inflation genuinely accelerates, because land values and rents tend to rise with the price level.
The catch is that “benefit if inflation accelerates” is a much more modest claim than “survives a crack-up boom.” The pitch uses the second framing because it sells, but the vehicles are built for the first. We profiled Gladstone Land in depth in our Gladstone Land stock piece and Farmland Partners in our Farmland Partners stock piece.
The Dividend and How It Works
The way a farmland REIT pays investors is through dividends, and that is where a lot of the pitch’s implied promise lives. A REIT must distribute most of its taxable income to shareholders to keep its tax status, so the dividend is not a bonus, it is the primary channel through which the rent from the land reaches you. Both Gladstone Land and Farmland Partners pay regular distributions, and the pitch leans on that income as part of the “survives a crisis” story.
The honest caveat is that a dividend is only as durable as the cash flow behind it. When farm operating costs rise or interest rates squeeze the balance sheet, the distribution can come under pressure, and a cut tends to hit the share price hard. Farmland rents are reasonably stable, but a small REIT’s ability to keep paying through a downturn is not guaranteed the way the pitch’s “no down years” framing implies. The dividend is real. The certainty attached to it is not.
The Honest Bottom Line
The farmland thesis is the strongest idea in the presentation and the weakest execution. Owning productive land is a genuinely sound way to protect against currency collapse, and the historical record supports it. Owning it through these two small, underperforming REITs is a different bet, one on interest rates and management execution as much as on the price of dirt. We covered the broader basket 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 worth taking seriously. The specific vehicles deserve more skepticism than the pitch gives them.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Crack-Up Boom presentation.
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