The single most memorable number in the “Crack-Up Boom” pitch is the farmland claim: a crisis asset “up over 1,700% over the long term, without a single down year in decades.” It is a genuinely impressive statistic, and it is also the place where the presentation quietly switches from selling you an asset to selling you a stock. Understanding where that 1,700 percent comes from is the difference between an informed decision and a blind one.

Where the Number Comes From

The 1,700 percent figure comes from an index of actual farmland values, the price of the dirt itself, tracked by organizations like NCREIF, which measures the performance of institutionally owned agricultural land. That index has indeed climbed steadily for decades, through the 1970s inflation, the 2008 crisis, and everything since. Farmland is one of the few assets that genuinely can claim a long run with very few down years, because people always need to eat and land is finite.

That is the honest basis of the claim. The number is not invented, and the asset class’s resilience is real. The problem is what the pitch does with it next. It points you not to the land but to two publicly traded REITs, Gladstone Land (LAND) and Farmland Partners (FPI), and implies the same 1,700 percent ride is available through them. It is not.

What the REITs Actually Delivered

Gladstone Land owns roughly 100,000 acres of specialty and value-added agriculture, orchards and vineyards, and trades around $7.42 with a market cap near $320 million. Farmland Partners owns about 70,000 acres of mostly row-crop land plus some solar parcels, trading around $8.58 with a market cap near $360 million. Both are small, both pay dividends, and both have delivered poor shareholder returns since inception.

The reasons are structural. A farmland REIT is a public stock, so it carries interest-rate sensitivity that raw land does not. When rates rise, the dividend yield looks less attractive and the stock price falls, regardless of what the underlying land is worth. The REITs also face real operating costs, farm labor, inputs, and management, that an index of land values does not. The pitch’s “no down years” is a property of the asset class, not of the stocks that claim to represent it. We walked through that gap in our farmland REIT explainer.

The Fine Print

There is another layer worth flagging. The presentation’s own table offers no performance measurement at all. Every pick is listed with “N/A” for last close and change, and the “Buy Price” equals the current price, because nothing was teased on a specific date. That means the 1,700 percent claim is the only number the pitch provides, and it is a number that does not describe the recommended vehicles. There is no scoreboard, no entry date, and no way to ever check whether the farmland sleeve did what was promised.

The presentation even concedes the point in its more honest moments. “Anybody who gives you a date is lying to you” is true, but it also removes the one thing, a timestamp, that would make the claim falsifiable. You can believe the farmland thesis entirely and still come away unable to tell whether the pitch’s specific picks ever delivered.

The Rate Sensitivity Problem

The single biggest reason the farmland REITs have lagged the land they own is interest rates, and it is worth understanding the mechanics. A REIT is valued partly for its dividend, and a dividend yield is always competing with what an investor could get from a risk-free bond. When interest rates rise, the bond yield rises, and the REIT’s dividend suddenly looks less attractive, so its share price falls to restore the balance. The land underneath does not change value in that moment, but the stock does.

This is the structural gap the pitch never mentions. Farmland, the asset, is not directly sensitive to the Fed’s policy rate in the way a geared REIT balance sheet is. The public wrapper, by contrast, is fully exposed to it, which is why both Gladstone Land and Farmland Partners suffered through the recent rate squeeze even as the underlying land held its value. An investor who wants the asset’s uncorrelated, inflation-resistant behavior is getting, instead, a stock that dances to the central bank’s tune.

The Honest Bottom Line

Farmland the asset class has earned its reputation, and the 1,700 percent number is a real testament to it. The two REITs being sold as its public proxy have not earned that reputation, and the pitch does not disclose the gap. We profiled both vehicles in our Gladstone Land stock piece and our Farmland Partners stock piece, and placed the farmland idea in its proper context in our farmland investing 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.” Buy the farmland story for what it is, a superb asset class with a checkered public wrapper, not for the 1,700 percent number pasted on top of it.

Ready to see the research? Click here to view the Crack-Up Boom presentation.

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