'Stacking' A New Business on Your Farm or Ranch
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Most farm businesses have searched for ways to diversify their income, but it can be a challenge to add a new business without sacrificing another. Nic De Castro, founder and CEO of LandTrust, promotes a strategy for landowners to stack multiple enterprises on the same property.
De Castro… “ I think especially from the ag community, it is you got to stack enterprises. Just farming, just ranching is fickle. It's hard to do unless you're doing it at large scale. So the landowners who love us are very much of that mindset, like, ‘Hey, we're in the land business. We got to make money from all the different aspects of it, stack these enterprises.’”
De Castro’s company helps landowners of various sizes cash in on interest from hunters.
De Castro… “ We have some listings that are five acres, and we've had a 50,000 contiguous acre listing. So obviously, you have an incredibly diverse range of earnings. But I mean five to ten thousand a year is probably right in the meat of things. We have landowners who make 80 to 90,000 a year. So it all depends on what you have access to on your land, what you're willing to list. So just depends on what the property is, the amenities, the access to high-quality fish and wildlife, et cetera. Yeah, our landowners are definitely paying for like—a lot of them pay for property taxes with LandTrust. We're never gonna cash flow, a land note with something like LandTrust, right? But you can absolutely stack it in, and it's almost pure profit.”
LandTrust helps landowners improve wildlife quality on their properties, with the goal of increasing their income.
