Lessons From the Delta, Part 2: Land Values, Capital Markets, and the Business of Rice

Lessons From the Delta continues — but this time, the focus shifts from fields to finance.

In Episode 2 of the Purdue Commercial AgCast mini-series, Chad Fiechter and Todd Kuethe sit down with Aaron Shew of Acres to explore how farmland is valued, how capital moves through the Delta, and why agricultural land markets are more complex than most producers realize.

Unlike residential real estate, there is no “Zestimate” for farmland. In many counties, fewer than 10 land transactions occur each year — yet prices can shift 5–10% annually. That creates real challenges for lenders, brokers, investors, and farmers trying to make long-term capital decisions.

The conversation also discusses:

• Why agricultural land data is fragmented and difficult to combine • How lenders and investment firms evaluate farmland purchases • The role of mortgage data and transaction history • What rice farmers are actually paid for — and why it’s different from corn and soybeans • How milling yield introduces another layer of risk

As the Delta’s irrigation-dependent system shows, land values, water access, and milling economics stack together to create a very different capital structure than what most Midwest producers experience.

While the crops may differ, the business questions are familiar: How do you value long-term assets in volatile markets? How does capital flow shape farm strategy? And how does payment structure influence risk?

This episode builds on Part 1 and sets up upcoming conversations on irrigation automation and capital investment decisions in the Delta.

We’ll also be sharing additional video clips and behind-the-scenes content from the trip on our YouTube channel throughout the series.

Subscribe to the Purdue Commercial AgCast so you don’t miss upcoming episodes in the Lessons From the Delta series.

For more farm management resources, visit: 👉 https://purdue.ag/commercialag

Subscribe to the podcast: 👉 https://purdue.ag/agcast

Follow us: X: https://twitter.com/PUCommercialAg Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PUCommercialAg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/center-for-commercial-agriculture

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
At Zillow, they like Zestimate.

(00:02):
You can look at the Zillow's estimatedvalue of a residential property,
even some commercial properties andpeople accept it as like, right.
There is nothing like that in ag land.
Because county ag land transactionsin given year, it's probably less
than 20, maybe even down below 10.

(00:24):
And you can have 5% or10% fluctuation over year.
So automated models likeZestimate aren't gonna work in ag.
Welcome to the Purdue Commercial Ag Cast.
I'm Chad Fiechter.
This week we're continuing our Lessonsfrom the Delta series - conversations

(00:45):
that Todd and I had recorded lastsummer while traveling through
the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas.
If you didn't catch episode one, welaid the groundwork for what makes
this region different - from thescale of rice production to the role
of irrigation and water management inshaping the entire production system.
In this episode, we dig deeperinto one of those conversations,
this time it's with Aaron Shew,chief Technology Officer of Acres.

We discuss the economics more (01:08):
land values, crop optionality, capital
intensity, and how risk is managed ina region where irrigation is a must.
You'll hear a lot of this recorded inreal time - in the truck, in the field
- as we try to understand how productionsystems evolve, when the constraints
are different than what most Midwesterncorn and soybean farmers are used to.

(01:29):
Our goal here isn't to compare regions.
It's to ask better questions and to thinkmore clearly about how capital, water, and
management decisions shape profitability.
This is episode two, ourconversation with Aaron Shew.
Aaron, can you introduce yourself andtell us a little bit about yourself?
Absolutely.
I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

(01:51):
I've been in Arkansasfor the last 13 years.
So basically, and adopted Arkansan.
I currently am the head product anddata, at a company called Acres.
You can check it out at acres dot com.
We're a software businessfocused on the land industry.
Exclusively prebuilt environment realestate, focus pretty heavily on the

(02:16):
ag industry, ag recreational land,ranch land, is bread and butter.
So have both a web app a, a mobileapp that serves clients in that space.
Acres is related to the investigativework that Acre Trader was doing

(02:39):
and systematically be able toevaluate purchase decisions
based on available data.
But a lot of the data that you haveand work with is already publicly
available or big data sets, butthey didn't play nicely together.
Plus then some additional valueadded things that are not publicly
available that you've acquired since.
Yeah.

(02:59):
Acre Trader has beenaround since 2018 roughly.
So I, I was a professor of agriculturaleconomics at University of Arkansas
at the time, this would've been aboutfour years ago, when a good friend of
mine, Ben Maddox at Anchor Trader, nowis Chief Strategy Officer, at Acres,

(03:21):
introduced me to the company andsaid, Hey, we're, we're contemplating
building out some mapping software tohelp support due diligence farmland.
So came on in a part-timeconsulting role and started
building the data team for Acres.
So that point in time, it was barelymore than, than a spreadsheet, basically

(03:42):
just a spreadsheet of the data setsthey wanted and how they wanted to
use them for diligence on farming.
So now, we're fast three and a halfyears, I was there about six months
part-time, just fell in love withthe business and the concept, both,
both sides the business, Acre Traderbusiness and the Acres business.
We built out this, this app was reallyinitially meant for internal due

(04:06):
diligence, but quickly we like we'veconsolidated, you know, or five other uh,
softwares being used for different things.
So let's see if, if we cango to market with this.
We actually broke out separate business.
So we are two businesses now undersame umbrella, Acre Trader and Acres.
What struck us pretty quicklyin this conversation wasn't just

(04:29):
the software side of what Aaron'sbuilding, it was what his work reveals
about land markets in agriculture.
And the delta especially, landvalues, lending relationships,
and transaction data play a muchbigger role in how capital moves
than I originally had thought.
So we asked Aaron to walk us throughhow agricultural land actually gets

(04:49):
valued and why it's so complex.
And who are the clients or users of Acres?
So the, the enterprise side of things,which highest value part of the
business, is gonna be, I'd broadlysay anybody that is buying, selling,
investing in, or lending in ag.

(05:10):
So that covers a broad swath of people.
Lots and lots of ag brokers, yourlarge agricultural lenders, which
includes both conventional banks,well as the farm credit system.
And then a number of similarfirms to Acre Trader.
So other investment capital firmsare managing farmland assets are

(05:31):
our clients, so that's at enterpriseWe then have some lower tiers.
So we're primarily a B2B software,but we do have a mobile app and, and a
consumer web application called Plus.
And so folks maybe broadly in,in the ag space, but they're not
making money buying selling land.
But they ownership data and theywant to see soils, vegetation

(05:54):
index, elevation, a bunch ofother data on a specific property.
can get access a lot of that dataon our plus version of the software,
which is like eight bucks a month.
So there, there's a couple coreobjectives our user gonna have.
So the very first focus of ours was howdo we value land better, better, right?

(06:15):
So if you go look atZillow, they like Zestimate.
You can go look at the, the Zillow'sestimated value of a residential
property, even some commercialproperties and people accept it as right.
There is nothing like that in agland and there likely won't be for

(06:35):
a very, very long time, if ever.
Because the data is so hard to combine.
If you think about the of ag landtransactions at a county level in
given year, it's just that many.
It's probably less than 20 in mostcounties, uh, maybe even down below 10.
And the market for land,of course, moves quickly.

(06:57):
So it might, I say it doesn't movethat quickly relative to the stock
market like over quickly but youcan have 5% fluctuation or 10%
fluctuation over year, in particularlythe three to five years, post COVID.
And the high interest rateenvironments has changed things.
So

(07:17):
automated models like Zestimatearen't gonna work in ag.
And so our users coming to our platformto get the best agricultural land
sales data you can get nationally.
So they're gonna come in our tool andthey're gonna go find target property.
So they come into the Delta, in Arkansas,they find that that property, you got

(07:38):
all the owner data from the the countyassessor's office and you can go check
out our sole land and you're gonnaget a mix of, of sales data there.
So you're gonna get courthouse sales.
You can find curated salesthat our team manually finds.
We monitor hundreds and hundreds ofwebsites every day and every week to
put in not just hey, sale price buyer,seller, but the actual sales collateral.

(08:04):
So think farm pictures andand the listings information
that you would for that farm.
It's attached are curated sales.
Then users put in their own datain a contributory database, which
means, and we don't charge for that.
It's just, Hey, if you wannashare, you're able to collect 10
sales a year in your own business.
If you put those in the system andmake them contributory, you can see

(08:27):
everybody else that contributes.
And so those are now on the tens ofthousands of like of highly curated
data by professionals that value land.
So would number one thing theseclients came to do is, okay, I've a
property I want, I need to value it.
So I'm gonna go grab my comparablesales, get a quick estimate
price per acre or they list for.

(08:49):
They may generate reports embeddedshare publicly market a property if
broker, pDFs diligence within a team.
So that, that was the one reason.
And then what seen evolve isthat folks are using it a lot
more for lead generation now.

(09:10):
So it's not so much, Hey, I'mgonna go value this property.
There's there's plenty of that still.
Still the core function.
The other thing is, we alsohave mortgage data in the tool.
So they can go search and filter farmmortgages, find the ones that are
maturing and reach out to those farmers.
So they can build a whole leadgeneration pipeline within

(09:31):
Acres and manage that as a team.
Across analysts or loan officers.
So that's another core function wouldbe lead generation and land management.
So our time together, traveling toDelta, you seem to just bring up
a random interesting that you didprior to what you're doing now.

(09:52):
Can you tell us briefly yourbackstory, your path to where you are?
I've had a rather, uh, variedcareer path you could say.
We can go way back to, you graduatedhigh school in Middle Tennessee and
tried the college path a semester,uh, turned out I liked bull riding and
drinking beer more than I liked school.

(10:13):
I dropped out of school andthrew a somewhat winding path
ended up in Thailand for a year.
So I, was, grew up working onhay farms in Middle Tennessee,
and so had the ag background.
Anyway, I I always wanted kind on edgeof things and I had this opportunity
to go to Thailand for a year.
Uh, worked with this demonstration farm.
Ended up back school.
Studied abroad numerous times.

(10:34):
I spent year in India.
I spent another six, eight monthsin, in the Middle East, a a couple of
different places, Morocco in particular.
And then, post-graduationwith undergrad, I married.
And my wife and I moved to firstAfghanistan to open a soybean mill.
And then after that got launched andoff the ground we we moved to Iraq

(10:58):
naturally to start another soybean mill.
Starting a new business inIraq in particular just a
massive learning experience.
We worked with about 10 farmers togrow a few hundred acres of soybeans.
Some things worked, some things didn't.
Business apart, and that's whenI decided that I should move
to Arkansas and go grad school.

(11:19):
So then ended here, went grad school.
So focus on GIS, geographicalinformation systems, or web sensing.
And travel in the worldis always interesting.
Photography, building maps.
I took took a a long termpostdoc with, USDA ag service.
And then, a pretty uniqueposition came up at Arkansas
State University in Jonesborough.

(11:41):
It's just one big college of the ag.
And you're with small scientists,plant scientists, but they an
endowed chair focused on agribusinessand innovation in the Delta.
And I'm not even remotely qualified for anendowed chair, but studied rice production
and spent a lot of time doing research andsome extension oriented working in Delta.

(12:03):
So I was like, I'm gonna throwmy name in the hat, you know.
And, uh, and, I pretty lucky.
So took that position and wasthere for about three years.
But U of A pulled back to, Fayettevilleafter three years Jonesboro, um, I an
offer come back to the U of A, to bethe associate director the the Center

(12:23):
for Spatial technologies, GIS sensing,uh, in an an ag econ faculty member.
So that right to where I at beforeI jumped to Acre Trader and Acres.
Okay, so the.
All that background it comes lotof technical skills and experience.

(12:46):
When I think software companiesand what happens on a day-to-day
basis in a software company,I, I have absolutely no idea.
My job is getting on the phonewith clients or potential clients.
What works, what doesn't work?
What biggest points?
What data sets do we not havethat we should have, and how
do you wanna interact with it?

(13:07):
So try to those questions to define,Hey, what should we build into this
software and what should we not,what should we, there's a lot of
art rather than science figuring outwhich features are most important to
invest as a whole engineering team.
I would assume also some of the peopleyou're working with were interested
in technology and then they've foundthemselves working in the ag space

(13:30):
and learning about agriculture.
What's your breakdown that you'veobserved in your firm or other firms
you've interacted with in terms of howmany of 'em are were getting people
interested in our problems versuswe're trying to learn about these
techniques from our problems first?
We spend most of our time again,just talking to those clients and
condensing their problems into solutionsthat we can deliver through Acres.

(13:54):
So very little internal knowledgeis, is required at this point because
we're spending a very sequenced andintense amount of time with our clients.
And that land discussion matters becausein the Delta production systems are deeply
tied to land characteristics, soils,water access, levee systems, and those

(14:15):
factors directly influence what cropsget planted and how they get paid for.
Specifically what we were interestedin was how rice farmers got paid.
It's very differentfrom corn and soybeans.
It's important to understand thatrice isn't sold the same way as
we in the Midwest sell grain.
You're not just paid on bushels harvested.
There's another layer to it.
So yeah, so we harvest the rice.

(14:37):
Mm-hmm.
Do you to dry it?
Mm, it comes out it's, it'ssimilar to, um, to grains in terms
of, you know, wait till harvestmoisture gets to a certain point.
You harvest it.
It's probably similar probably wheat.
Similar grass variety, grass crop.
What very interesting though about ricethat's very different from corn and

(15:03):
soybeans that you're paid on raw yields.
You harvest your rice and you generally,the typical thing folks in Arkansas is
take it to a large rice cooperative,like Rice Mill or Windstream.
There's, there's a numberof of co-ops out there.
It goes through the mill and gethead rice yield, milling rice yield,

(15:30):
Head rice?
Head Rice.
Head rice yield.
HRY.
Farmers get paid basedon their percentage.
Without getting too, too crazywith the math, you can expect
you get, if 55% head rice yields.
That's full kernel unbroken rice.
Milling rice yields be that 55%plus another, say 10% of broken rice

(15:51):
which it comes at a discounted rate.
Okay.
And so you're paid a certain pricefor your brokens at a certain price
for your, your head rice yield,full kernels, and that shakes out,
multiplied by the raw counterweightsharvested what actually earn.
The more we listened,the clearer it became.

(16:13):
The delta agriculture isn'tjust a different crop mix, it's
a different capital structure.
Land values, irrigation, investment,milling risk, they all stack together
in ways that change how risk is managed.
That's part two of ourlessons from the Delta series.
Next week, we're gonna continue theconversation with Colson Tester, digging
further into how irrigation is managedon the ground, what automation looks

(16:36):
like in practice, and how some ofthese capital decisions compare to what
Midwestern grain farmers are facing today.
If you're finding value in thisseries, make sure to subscribe to
the Purdue Commercial AgCast so youdon't miss what we're doing next.
We'll continue this Delta seriesover the next several weeks alongside
our regular Ag Economy Barometerinsights and implication episodes.

(16:56):
And if you wanna see some of what we'retalking about, the fields, the levies,
the water management, we're sharingshort video clips from our Arkansas
trip over on our YouTube channel.
Those visuals may help reallybring these conversations to life.
If this episode sparked a thoughtfor you, consider sharing it with
a friend or another producer whomight benefit from this discussion.
Thanks for listening, andwe'll see you next time.