Making Farmland More Accessible
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
About half of U.S. farmland is expected to change hands over the next two decades. Acres, a land evaluation tool, was created to make a more efficient market out of land acquisition, says data science director, Dr. Aaron Shew.
Shew… “We’re founded on the idea that more Americans will own farmland in the future, like period. We want that to happen. As we move forward, more people are invested in land or own land, and maybe not just a single parcel of land, they want to capture that portfolio view. They want to see what all of their land is doing. They want to have custom dashboard views and be able to surmise how they’re performing against other market activities. If I wanted to make a really bold statement, I could say that we’re building a sort of a Bloomberg terminal for farmland transactions. That’s the idea - is that we have one geospatial platform for land transactions to take place where data is really available for anybody in that market. We believe in an efficient market, and unfortunately in the ag industry, farmland is not an efficient market. There’s a lot of asymmetric information, and we’re trying to bring more transparency to that space because we believe the market overall will be healthier because of it.”
Shew says Acres hopes to make the land acquisition process more transparent, and Acres is a significant step towards that end. Learn more at acres.co.
