SPECIALIZED FINANCING

FOR THE ORGANIC SECTOR

Offering $25 Million in 'Rooted in Regeneration' Notes

A rainbow shines over a longhouse structure at the Berry Farm in Scoharie County, NY.

Read more about our financing of this land back initiative with the Mohawk Nation here.

Greetings from a warming planet! Each week, our remote team gathers for a staff call and inevitably compares notes on the extreme weather we’re experiencing across our locations. Wildfire smoke, flooding, drought, and excessive heat are affecting all of us, and growing food in these conditions is all the more challenging.  It has become increasingly evident that the way we do business and the kind of transformation we seek needs to support resiliency, longevity, and healing.

Iroquois Valley believes that organic agriculture is crucial to the well-being of our communities and our ecosystems. BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) farmers in particular overwhelmingly use regenerative or organic farming practices but have historically faced significant challenges to accessing fair and equitable financing for their operations. Too often left out of the picture, BIPOC farmers have long played and continue to play an active role in the organic agriculture movement.

Iroquois Valley has always supported demographics on the margins of agriculture, including young, women, or BIPOC farmers. In fact, 60% of the farmers we work with are millennial (25-40 years old) and 5% are generation Z (under 24 years old). 11% of the farmers we work with identify as BIPOC, and women are represented in 70% of the operations we support. These communities need more explicit support and investment to achieve our shared goals, and the increasing impacts of climate change mean that we must also increase our impact to meet these challenges.

Challenges Identified by BIPOC Farmers

• 59% of Black and 54% of young BIPOC farmers find accessing capital to be “very or extremely challenging”

• 75% of young Black farmers said they need more access to land

• 87% of BIPOC young farmers said they are motivated to farm in order to steward and regenerate natural resources

Source: National Young Farmers Coalition Survey, 2022

Evolving Our Products

The Company believes that for its investments to be truly impactful, they must be accessible to all potential players in the organic farmland space. We see underinvestment in organic BIPOC farmers as a hole in the fabric of organic agriculture that hurts us all. With the challenges we’re facing, we need to accelerate the pace of investment so that those who want restoration have what they need to expand their work. 

Since 2007, Iroquois Valley has centered on farmer need and evolved our products over time. We began with long-term leases that offer lower payments during the organic transition years; expanded to mortgages that include interest-only periods; and most recently, started to offer lines of credit that are highly customized to the borrower’s cash flow cycle. Our investors enable us to offer unique products, including funding our own grant program through the Soil Restoration Notes. Our Soil Restoration Pool is now in its fifth year, and has deployed over $200,000, supporting 30+ farmers' soil health and conservation projects, all generated by investors foregoing some of their interest payments. With farmers at the heart of our work, Iroquois Valley is proud to evolve its offerings once more to better meet the needs of underserved organic farmers.

Rooted in Regeneration: A New Note Offering

We are excited to release our new Rooted in Regeneration Notes. These notes support our work, and incentivize farmland ownership for BIPOC organic farmers. Iroquois Valley believes that mobilizing support for BIPOC farmers will increase land stewardship across the country.

Details for investors:

• $25,000 minimum investment
• 3-,5-, or 7-year maturity
• 0.5-3.0% annual return to investor
• 1.0-1.5% interest paid into Rooted in Regeneration Pool
• Accredited investors only

This note includes a unique mechanism – the Rooted in Regeneration (RnR) Pool. The RnR Pool offers support for BIPOC borrowers through an interest rate deduction on their mortgages with the company. The RnR Pool follows our Soil Restoration Pool technique, whereby investors divert a portion of their interest payments to fund mortgage interest discounts. Iroquois Valley can then offer below-market interest rates to eligible farmers, while recouping our cost of capital. Eligibility is determined both by a farmer belonging to the “socially disadvantaged” category as defined by USDA and by demonstrating exemplary conservation practices. We invite you to learn more about the RnR Pool and this offering on our website here.  

For Iroquois Valley to responsibly engage in this work, we must be clear about who we are: we are a for-profit, farmland investment company. We are not a front-line organization directly engaging with farmers through policy or advocacy. We structure our products and initiatives to ensure that all those who want to access land security and farmland ownership have products that meet their needs. We look forward to partnering with front-line organizations and farmers as we get our Rooted in Regeneration initiative off the ground. 

As a company, we want to draw on our strengths: we know that we are creative in the ways we offer land security and provide financial services to organic farmers. Neither these Notes nor our plans for the RnR Pool are a perfect or final solution to a long history of discrimination in agricultural finance. As such, we are thoughtfully designing a program that proactively seeks stakeholder input. We hope this initial offering of the Rooted in Regeneration Note will be a step in the right direction, and one we expect to revisit, adjust, and improve as we learn how to make it more useful, just, and transformative. 

Save The Date: Annual Shareholder Meeting

Our virtual annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for September 13th at 1pm Central. This event is open to our shareholders and financial advisors only – please be on the lookout for communications as we get closer to the date.

Get In Touch

We are extremely proud to share that we secured almost $2 million in Rooted in Regeneration Note investment in its opening weeks. 2023 marks our 16th year in business, and our portfolio has grown from one relationship with one farmer on 120 acres in Iroquois County, Illinois, to over 70 relationships with farmers stewarding over 30,000 acres in 19 states. We are grateful for your ongoing support and trust in our mission.

If you are a farmer interested in working with us, please see here to learn more or reach out to our farmer relations team at farmerinfo@iroquoisvalleyfarms.com. 

Learn more about investing in either our REIT equity shares or RnR note by viewing the offering documents or reaching out to Donna Holmes, our Managing Director, Investor Relations at invest@iroquoisvalleyfarms.com.

RNR Notes are available to accredited investors only. You may only invest after careful consideration of our complete Private Placement Memorandum, verification of your accredited investor status, and the submission of any other information required by Iroquois Valley relating to your proposed investment. No offering of RNR Notes is being made to investors until the Company has complied with the applicable state law. 

Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, PBC is offering its common stock for sale pursuant to Tier 2 of Regulation A+ and as such intends to be exempted from state qualification pursuant to federal law. No offer to sell securities or solicitation of an offer to buy securities is being made herein or in any state where such offer or sale is not permitted under the blue sky or state securities laws thereof. Offerings are only made through our Offering Circular, available here. Some of the statements herein may constitute forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described in the Offering Circular.

No offering is being made to investors unless and until the offering has been noticed in that state, as applicable. In compliance with state securities laws, Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, PBC is prohibited from offering and selling our common stock to residents of the following states through our Reg A offering until further notice: NV and TX. Furthermore, please contact the Company if you reside in NY, OH or TN to determine if an investment in our common stock (or further investment) is possible.