Koen van Seijen asks a provocative question in this month’s interview: what would you do with a hundred million dollars?
A pile of cash that large is likely not a problem most of us will ever have to deal with. But access to capital is essential in order to grow a business. Now, you might not want to grow your operation — contentedness is a wonderful thing as well — but if you’re an ecological farmer, the world needs more of what you’re offering! If you can expand what you’re doing onto more acres, chances are that’d be a good thing for all of us.
So, de-extrapolate van Seijen’s hundred-million-dollar question to your own context: if someone offered you $10,000, or $100,000, at decent terms, how would you best use it?
I had lots of experience with this type of situation when I was in the Army. The government’s fiscal year runs through the end of September, which meant that every organization wanted to spend all of its allocated budget by that date. Being the government — this is enough to drive a person crazy — every leader was incentivized not to save money by coming in as far under budget as possible, but rather to spend every penny so as to demonstrate the supposed importance of the organization, and thus the need for the same or a greater amount of funding the following year. The secondary point of this story: put not your confidence in government.
The primary point is that the best way to play this game with your tax dollars (best for the organization and one’s career) was to develop plans in advance for how to spend extra end-of-year funds. The best officers would have separate binders for each UFR (unfunded request) that they could turn in as soon as the budget people said there was extra money that needed to be spent — $200,000 for new radios; $50,000 for a research project; $1,000,000 for new vehicles, etc. Whether or not we should have been allowed to spend all that money, we were prepared to do so.
While it’s unlikely someone’s going to knock on your door saying they have a blank check for you to spend on your farm, you can probably think of some things that would help grow your operation — new equipment, better precision testing and inputs, neighboring land, marketing and sales support, etc.
Van Seijen’s point is that there is a lot of excitement about regenerative agriculture right now among investors — to the point that they have a hard time spending it intelligently. The more prepared farmers are in terms of knowing what they need to expand and in communicating this, the more likely they will be able to tap into these emerging resources. Both interviews in this issue — with van Seijen and with Biome Capital’s Erin Feger — highlight the growing availability of funding for the type of farming readers of Acres U.S.A. are doing. You are the types of farmers investors are looking for; are you ready to utilize what they’re offering?
And that’s the view from the country.
