Protecting Farmland Investments Through Market Downturns

Chris Criglow
Partner, Real Estate

Abstract

As farmland markets face economic headwinds, legal strategies around investment management are shifting. In this video, Chris Criglow, a partner in the Real Estate Group at Stoel Rives, discusses how declining commodity prices and changing market conditions have led to increased distress in farmland investments. Rather than facilitating acquisitions, Criglow and his team are now focused on helping clients navigate cash flow issues with farm operators, including restructuring leases to support ongoing operations.

Criglow emphasizes that farmland investing is deeply relationship-driven, and most clients aim to preserve ties with operators even amid financial difficulty. However, when lease amendments aren’t enough, Stoel Rives helps clients manage transitions, retrieving the farm, securing new operators, and ensuring continuity. With support from the firm’s bankruptcy and creditors' rights experts, clients can make strategic decisions while keeping legal costs manageable and operations stable.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Chris Criglow. I'm a partner in the Real Estate Group at Stoel Rives.

In the area of farmland investment, unfortunately, the last couple of years the trend has been distress in the investments, either for shrinking markets or shifting markets or depressed prices. That's had us shift from helping our clients to acquire farmland to helping our clients work with farm operators to deal with cash flow issues. Maybe we need to amend their leases to help them kinda weather the storm financially and stay afloat. Sometimes those don't work and then we kinda pivot to helping the client get the farm back, find the new operator.

And the important thing that really makes farmland investment unique is that it's a very relationship-based industry. Most people, like our clients, don't want to sour relationships with the farm operator. It's just an unfortunate circumstance and the farm operator is not able to continue. The reality is our clients have a duty to their investors, have a duty to basically manage these assets and make sure they're profitable and generating returns.

But it's one of those things where it's really good to be at a firm like Stoel, where I have subject-matter experts who can help in any situation. So in those situations, The ones i might need to talk to are the creditors' rights, bankruptcy lawyers who could help us navigate how to manage the new reality more efficiently and if there needs to be an exit where we need to take the farm back and get a new operator, we can manage that and try to keep legal costs low and keep the farm operating.