Paul Pittman
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott. Please go ahead, Rob
Thank you, Luca. I want to spend a few minutes sort of talking about the broader context of our business and what we're doing as well as amplifying the very sound results we are reporting for this quarter and how we continue to improve those results in the coming quarters. I wanted to start though with a general theme of, how proud we are to be a part of the production agriculture industry. I think a lot of people missed the fact that this is one of the leading industries in the United States, and a place where the U.S. has the preeminent position on a worldwide basis. We have the best producers of egg commodities in the world in this country and most of those men and women – and many of those men and women are our tenants. 97% of the acres farmed in the United States are farmed by family farmers, a 100% of our tenants are those family farmers. These medium and large farmers, what we call the top quartile producers who are our tenants make up 8% of U.S. farmers, but are responsible for 60% of the production. To think about the success of this industry and how we as an investors participate in it, one farmer in the United States creates the food for a 155 people. That number was only 26 in 1960 and only 5 in 1930. The United States farmer cultivates 12% of the land in the world and produces 35% of the corn and 18% of the other grains that the world consumes on just 12% of the acres. And now, the fact that the industry should be most proud of, 20% of the world population was under nourished in 1990. It is now just 11% and declining every year. So as we think about those facts in the context of our specific business, land is a residual claimant of return to agriculture. Our business model is the safe, simple way to participate in food production in the global food demand story. When we think about this particular quarter, which was frankly outstanding a $0.16 AFFO per quarter, which is a 168% year-over-year growth, really showing the powerful impact that scale will start to create in our financial results, we are right on pace for the $0.58 to $0.62 guidance we had given a month and half or so ago. Obviously, the analysts' models are a little different than what our actual quarterly results are. We are thrilled with the service that the analysts provide to us in the marketplace. However, we are a very new Company and I think there is a little lag in getting to understand exactly how these results come through on a quarter-by-quarter basis, as I've said many times. The annual results in agriculture are reasonably easy to measure, the quarterly results are slightly more complex, but for the equity analysts on the phone in particular, the $0.16 would have been $0.18, but for two transactions that we would have closed in the last week of June that we had some diligence challenges in those transactions and moved those closings to the first of the third, first week or two of the third quarter. So when you work your way through the math, we're basically right on pace, prior to the equity offering for the guidance we had given. We will update this guidance in the next month or so, for the additional equity we raised. When you think about our execution against the promises we made at the IPO, we have done, I believe, quite well. We had around 7,300 acres at the IPO. Today, we have almost 72,000. We have 123 farms and a diverse number of crops in a diverse number of locations, around the United States. We had three States where we owned land at the IPO. Now we have 11. We have four tenants at the IPO. Now we have 40. We've made three dividend increases starting with a $0.42 dividend raising it to $46.04 and then again recently to $0.51. The market today does not seem to recognize that execution or the underlying fundamentals of our business. There is a deep value opportunity in our Company at the current stock price. The dividend yield is frankly now quite high and we are continuing to see better cap rates in the transactions, that we do. We are trading below NAV and the reasons that I hear, when I occasionally talk to investors and other market participants, just don't frankly make any sense. Land prices have continued to hold in most, if not all markets. Farmer incomes are continuing to be strong. This particular point, I think, a lot of observers and in fact, some people who write in the press are missing any sense of historical context. You will see headlines that talk about a material decline in farmer income, but what that is saying is that it's a material decline from the highest farmer incomes ever. The recent past is still by historical standards, well above average performance for farmers and will continue to be so. So any observer with any real context recognizes that this is still a very profitable time for farmers, which is frankly why you are not seeing a lot of pressure on rents. As far as commodity prices, specifically go, what I always tell folks is keep an eye on the demand for the commodities, not on the actual price, because if we get a change in the underlying demand for these commodities that is an important signal that day-to-day or month-to-month moves in price is a far less important signal, as it relates to land values and rents. Recently, our stock has traded down, in the last few days. If you did an index graph, compared to corn, you would see that somebody thinks that just because corn and soybeans go down, our rents are going to go down. I've said this about a hundred times, it's personally frustrating to us. That is not how this industry and this market works. If you see declines in our stock price, frankly driven by declines in commodity prices, that's a buying opportunity. What I believe is going on here is that it's easy to look at these commodity prices, but more difficult to look at the actual underlying value of our assets, which is the land. The land is incredibly scarce. There are seldom, if ever repeat sales in the lifetime of a given farmer. So the demand for those assets and the pricing of those assets stays strong. As I've said many times, unless you have a sustained downturn in farmer profitability, Farmland values will maintain or rise over time. The other thing that I often hear on this topic, when I speak to investors that I wanted to address, is that that commodity price over the long-term, does not change very much in real dollar terms. That is frankly true, but not really relevant, because what drives our ability to raise rents over time is not the change in commodity price per se. It is the change in revenue and income from the land and so just to give you an example, the average corn yield on a farm -- on the United States farms, average clear across the country with a 171 bushels last year. In 1984, it was approximately 108 bushels. So you've got a constant increasing production of the corn and you would find a somewhat similar statistic in wheat or soybeans or any of the other major commodities. So our perspective is and what drives fundamental profitability for the farmer, it doesn't take price increase, it takes revenue and net income to increase, which is often driven by increases in production. The next thing I wanted to mention is that we have started to invest in specialty crops, as you probably saw, we've made investments now or about to make investments, we have them under contract in a couple of blueberry farms. We started with blueberries in particular, because we think it is a reasonably safe market. The blueberry demand is growing. It is certainly viewed as sort of a super food, in terms of -- from a health perspective. We specifically went to Michigan, because of the major growing regions of blueberries in the United States. It is an area in which you don't have to take a lot of risks on irrigation water, and we wanted to kind of tread carefully and go slowly, as we entered this market space. Over time, you will see us grow the specialty portfolio exposure of our overall portfolio to specialty to around 20% to 30% of our portfolio. We believe that when we buy specialty crops, meaning we are buying land, plus a growing tree or a growing bush. We want to get at a minimum a 200 basis point spread over the traditional ag commodities we do in terms of current return, that's to compensate frankly for the additional complexity and risk with those sorts of properties. We believe, that specialty crops blended into our overall portfolio will dampen portfolio volatility and enhance yield. The reason we believe that is that those specialty crops, whether it is blueberry, apples, almonds, grapes, tomatoes, they tend to trade on and oscillate on a different cycle than the commodity crops. So that's why we want to blend some of this into the portfolio. People often ask me though, why don't we do even more than 20% to 30% specialty crops, and the answer is that our view is that we want to create a portfolio of properties that is tied to the global food demand story and not sort of try to chase yield or chase kind of the flavor of the month or the hot new idea, which is often the case with some of these specialty crops. So, to amplify that point, this morning, we pulled some date about the top five crops and agriculture goods produced in the United States and here they are. Number one is corn, number two is cattle, the beef from that cattle, number three is soybeans, number four is milk, number five is chicken. At the end of the day, all of those meat goods are fundamentally corn and soybeans, as well. So the crops we invest in really are the drivers of this kind of global food demand and that's where the bulk of our portfolio given our view of the marketplace will remain and in our view should remain. Those top five are 60% of the sales of agriculture goods from the United States. The data -- this kind of data changes gradually over time, although it doesn't change very fast. I think you sort of get my point. So with that, I will turn it over to Luca and then we will have questions, later on.