Harvest Returns Finds Investment Opportunities in Specialty Agriculture

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

One trend to keep an eye on in agriculture has been crowdfunding. This is where an online platform lists an investment, and crowds of people can individually invest in that project. Harvest Returns started their crowdfunding platform for farmland a few years ago, but CEO Chris Rawley said they have expanded to also include other agricultural investment opportunities.

Rawley… “At first, we were fairly opportunistic in the deals that we had, and now we're much more selective in trying to sort of shape our portfolio for the kind of deals. And we're looking at several verticals that we started focusing on. One is the indoor, the controlled environment agriculture. And another is grassfed livestock. And we've done a number of those deals. And then we have recently in the past year began to do some early stage ag tech companies. Closed a few of those this year. And then I put the rest in kind of specialty crops.”

Noticeably absent on that list of investment opportunities is farmland for large-scale broadacre crops.

Rawley… “The one sort of crops that we really don't do for a number of reasons, are commodity type crops. And the reasons include: there's many other places to invest in those, and also, you know, it helps differentiate us. And we like sort of the transformational aspects of the specialty verticals that we've chosen.”

Rawley said the platform is constantly expanding their number of listed deals and their participating investors.