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Farmland Partners - >>> This Colorado CEO grew a farmland REIT into a billion-dollar public company

Colorado CEO's 25-employee public company owns $1.1 billion in land in 17 states.


By Greg Avery

Denver Business Journal

Mar 25, 2022


https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2022/03/25/colorado-paul-pittman-farmland-partners-inc.html?ana=yahoo


Paul Pittman brought a combination of Midwestern farming and corporate finance together in a public company in Denver.

He’s the top executive of one of the few companies connecting the world of finance to farming and agriculture, a real estate company that’s a landlord to tenant farmers around the country and allows investors to benefit from the farmers’ success feeding people.

The business is a culmination of the lifetime of experience for Pittman, one that embodies his belief that "everybody gets to eat" and is tied to Colorado because of his passion for the state’s iconic sport, skiing.

Pittman grew up around farms in Illinois, the son of a schoolteacher who partly owned a family farm. He worked on a dairy farm as a teenager and went to college at the University of Illinois to study agriculture.

But U.S. agriculture was in crisis, a time when it seemed the traditional family farm might not survive.

“I graduated in 1985, the worst year for agriculture since the Great Depression, maybe even worse than then,” he said. “It was a terrible time to go into farming.”

The first Farm Aid concert was held the same year in a field in Illinois to raise money and awareness about a wave of U.S. farm failures.

Pittman was a good student, though, so he studied more. He attended graduate school at Harvard University and then law school at the University of Chicago before establishing a career in Wall Street finance that took him to live in New York City and London.

His company, Farmland Partners Inc. (NYSE: FPI) is one of only a couple of real estate investment trusts that focus on agricultural land.

The 25-employee company owns 160,200 acres in 17 states and generates money from the lease payments of tenant farmers working the land. The company’s land holdings are worth $1.1 billion. It also owns a couple of small cattle feedlots, a farm auction business and lends money to finance farm operations.

Investors can buy shares in Farmland Partners and invest in agriculture in the same way that other REITs allow investors to buy into multifamily or commercial real estate.

The only other agricultural REIT in the U.S. invests in specialty cropland. Farmland Partners is unique in that it aims to own productive land that mirrors the geography and crops of the nation, Pittman said. That ties the company to everything from corn, wheat, soybeans and cotton to cattle and potatoes.

Living internationally when he worked in M&A finance, he needed a U.S. home to return to, he said. He’d developed a passion for skiing, and nowhere had a higher concentration of world-class resorts than Colorado, so Pittman made his domestic residence in Breckenridge.

He focused on international mergers and acquisitions, which in the early 2000s pulled him into being an executive at technology businesses, including Denver-based building industry software company HomeSphere.

By 2008, he was among the executives running Southern California semiconductor maker Jazz Technologies, a company that included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as chief technology officer. After the management sold that business, Pittman’s roots called him.

“I told my wife I’m going back to do what I always wanted to do, and farm,” he said.

He’d assembled some land in southern Illinois and started farming there. He understood what made good farmland — good quality soil, plus access to abundant, predictable and replenishable water supplies. He farmed for six years, learning something new about himself.

“I was an OK farmer, not a great one,” Pittman said, “but I was a good land guy.”

Pittman started investing more broadly in farmland, acquiring properties in Nebraska and Colorado that would become part of Farmland Partners.

The company went public in 2014, based in Denver where it was easy to find skilled employees, and a city with a strong connection to agriculture. Denver’s location and airport access meant equally easy access to U.S. farm country and skiing, Pittman said.

Farm fields in areas with many successful farmers always attract tenants who can make the land productive, Pittman said. With a growing population needing to eat and cities growing into rural areas, that makes good farmland a terrific investment.

“If you have ever-increasing demand for the product coming off the land and an ever-decreasing supply of the land, it’s a great long-term opportunity,” Pittman said.

The company’s been able to acquire farm properties from other local investors, often successful doctors or dentists from rural areas who invested, or people who inherited farmland but don’t work it themselves.

“We’re primarily buying from remote owners,” Pittman said. “The perception is that we buy land from farmers, the guy driving the tractor, but that’s rarely what happens.”

The land itself is valuable because of the farming on it and the leases farmers commit to on the land. Farmland Partners relies on having good relations with successful farmers in each area where it owns land, which helps ensure there’s a tenant for all Farmland Partners’ acreage.

That requires an understanding of agriculture, local knowledge of the community, a willingness to do deals considered small by Wall Street standards, and a view of farmland as a long-term investment. That’s not a combination commonly found in many investment funds, Pittman said.

Pittman is married to Julie Levenson Pittman, who runs her own investment bank. The couple has two daughters, one in college and another in high school.

Pittman's free time often involves being outside, skiing in winter and lake fishing in warm seasons.

He’s been involved in winter sports program in Breckenridge over the years.

Pittman’s guilty pleasure is also on the slopes. When he can, Pittman takes heli-skiing trips to carve turns in untracked mountain snowfields.

“There’s an absolute child-like joy in descending in deep powder,” he said. “Plus, it doesn’t hurt when I fall.”

He’s a voracious reader, a habit he says he learned in law school, especially of history. He’s particularly fascinated by Winston Churchill, Britain’s leader in World War II, who Pittman finds laudable because Churchill was willing to resist public sentiment, confront fascism and played an outsized role in preserving a free and democratic Western world.

Pittman’s long been involved in Colorado Concern, a group that advocates for public policies that support business and entrepreneurs, because he believes business, and the wealth it allows people to create, is the engine of advancement for society.

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