Uruguay-based The Land Group is expanding to Brazil with its real asset management model that relies on regenerative farming to deliver returns to investors.
Part asset manager, part farmland operator, The Land Group acquires property and manages it with a variety of regenerative practices for institutional, family office, and fund investors. The firm currently has 40,000 hectares (just under 100,000 acres) under operation in Uruguay and Paraguay.
Expanding to Brazil is the next obvious step, cofounder Francisco Roque de Pinho tells AgFunderNews.
For starters, there is plenty of capital in Brazil. “There are many large institutional investors, a lot of family offices, a lot of capital available to invest,” he explains. “Of course, most of that capital is invested locally, but if we manage to tap into even a small part of that, we should definitely be talking to those investors.”
Brazil is also an agricultural powerhouse: It is the world’s fourth-largest grain producer and second-largest exporter of the crop, in addition to being the world’s largest beef exporter.
“Most people in the country have some connection or exposure to agriculture, says Pinho. “Not necessarily regenerative, but agriculture is part of their culture, which helps explain the investment opportunity.”
Adjacent to Uruguay, Brazil shares many cultural characteristics with The Land Group’s home country, too, which makes the initial approach to investors easier, he adds.
All of which makes for an ideal environment in which to expand. “Brazilian investors are generally familiar with and often have extensive experience in agriculture and natural resources, which makes them well positioned to recognize the opportunity to create long-term value through investments in regenerative farmland,” says Pinho.
Scalable and profitable practices
The Land Group was born about a decade ago, when Founders Pinho and Joaquín Labella started restoring distressed assets in South America on behalf of European family offices.
“Over time, we realized that we needed to take some measures—what for us were common-sense measures—to improve the soils in our lands, because they’d been degraded by poor management over many years,” Pinho tells AgFunderNews.
For example, some land had undergone 10 years of soybean planting and harvesting without any rotation, leading to heavily degraded soils. Pinho and Labella introduced livestock and a multi-paddock rotational grazing strategy to the land. They officially launched The Land Group in 2016.
Since then, the firm has evolved from restoring degraded lands to contributing “at scale” to the conversion of conventional farmland into regenerative.
“We found that the best way to do that is by focusing on regenerative practices that are, one, scalable, and, two, more profitable for our clients.”
This is important, he adds, because some regenerative practices may be attractive but not scalable or profitable. “It’s hard to convince an investor to remain small and give up returns to be more sustainable,” he says.
“For most of our clients today, priority number one is to have the assets more productive, and of course all the sustainability that comes with that is a great plus. But there’s no sacrificing one for the other.”
“Our model has always been what we call ‘separately managed accounts,’” says Pinho. “We are not managing investment funds today. Instead, each investment is a separate account managed according to the needs of our specific client for a specific asset or group of assets.”
For Brazil, The Land Group is in discussions for this model as well as “more standard investment funds,” he adds.
While he’s not sure yet which will prevail (“We might end up doing both”), he says there is a huge opportunity in Brazil to convert conventional land to regenerative.
“Through the conversations we’ve had, we’ve started gaining access to interesting opportunities to work on existing assets in Brazil—assets that already operate conventionally and where growers or owners are interested in converting them to regenerative,” he adds. “That sits well with us because it’s a large part of our work and is how our business was born.”
