Earnings Call Transcript - LAND Q4 2025

Operator, Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Gladstone Land Corporation Year-End and Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, David Gladstone, President and Chief Executive Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

David Gladstone, President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, thank you for that nice introduction. This is David Gladstone, and welcome to the quarterly conference call for Gladstone Land. Thank you all for calling in today. We appreciate you taking time out of your day to listen to our presentation. Hopefully, we give you some indication of where we're going. Now, we'll hear from Catherine Gerkis, our Director of Investor Relations, to provide a brief disclosure regarding certain regulatory matters concerning this call and this report. Catherine, go to it.

Catherine Gerkis, Director of Investor Relations

Good morning. Today's call may include forward-looking statements, which are based on management's estimates, assumptions, and projections. There are no guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements due to various uncertainties, including the risk factors set forth in our SEC filings, which you can find on the Investors page of our website, gladstoneland.com. We assume no obligation to update any of these statements unless required by law. Please visit our website for a copy of our Form 10-K and earnings press release, both issued yesterday for more detailed information. You can also sign up for our email notification service and find information on how to contact our Investor Relations department. We are also on X @GladstoneComps as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. Keyword for both is the Gladstone Companies. Today, we'll discuss FFO, which is funds from operations, a non-GAAP accounting term defined as net income, excluding gains or losses from the sale of real estate and any impairment losses on the property plus depreciation and amortization of real estate assets. We may also discuss core FFO, which we generally define as FFO adjusted for certain nonrecurring revenues and expenses and adjusted FFO, which further adjusts core FFO for certain noncash items, such as converting GAAP rents to normalized cash rents. We believe these metrics can be a better indication of our operating results and allow better comparability of our period-over-period performance. Now I'll turn it back over to David Gladstone.

David Gladstone, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Catherine. Folks, we sold a few more farms during the fourth quarter, which brought us to 6 property sales for the year totaling $95 million in proceeds, and we recognized an aggregate gain from these sales of about $21 million. So your company is in good shape today. After these sales, we still own nearly 99,000 acres across 144 farms, which amounts to about 56,000 acre-feet. In case you forgot, I'll translate that to 18 billion gallons of water that we've got stored in aquifers, and so we're in good shape for that part of our work. Our farms are in 14 different states and our water assets are all in California. And right now, there's plenty of water in California. So we're all in good shape from that perspective. Regarding the two sales we completed during the quarter, one was a small blueberry farm down in North Carolina. The tenant had fallen behind in his rents, and it was a tough property for us to get to new tenants. So while we took a small loss in the sale, we thought it best just to get rid of that farm since it was out of the normal territory that we're in. The other sale was a really nice farm in Colorado, where the lease was set to expire at the end of the year, and we were likely facing a downward rent bump and reset. So we took the opportunity to sell the property for more than we had in it originally and paid. So it was decided to go ahead and take the gain and move from that area of farms. We may consider selling some additional farms. In fact, we've got several that we're talking to buyers over the next few quarters as part of our ongoing portfolio review. If we're able to complete some of those, we'd like to use most of the proceeds to pay down debt and also to buy back some of that more expensive preferred stock that we have and trigger a gain there. But we're still evaluating the opportunities. And at this point, we're hopeful of a good transaction that will come and show how good we are in buying and holding these properties. On the acquisition side, financing costs, which seem to be slowly moving closer to where we like them to be, but we're not quite there yet. We're hoping interest rates will continue to move in the right direction. That is down. So we can get back to growing the portfolio as we've been out of the business for quite a while. We've got a lot of land that we own, but it'd be nice to pick up some now because prices seem to be moving in the right direction. We're still taking a disciplined approach to any new investments. Interest rates and our overall cost of capital remain elevated, and the capital rates on most row crop farmland remain too low to make it economically viable for us today if we have to use a lot of debt to buy it. On the leasing side, as we've talked about on prior calls due to the market conditions affecting certain permanent crops, particularly nuts and wine grapes, we adjusted the lease structure on a handful of properties to help our growers reduce their fixed costs. As a result of doing that reduction, in essence, we're taking a larger percentage of the gross crop sales instead of fixed rent payments. We also decided to direct the operation of two properties ourselves with the help of third-party operators. We believe a lot of the farms in the United States are just set up like that. So people bring in farming expertise as we are. I'll let Bill and Lewis, the two next speakers, talk about that. But overall, we had a successful harvest, particularly with almonds and pistachios. We're still expecting significant amounts of revenue from the 2025 pistachio harvest to come during 2026. So they're not in there yet. But we won't know the exact amount until the processes of those nuts have finalized their settlement with us. I wanted to remind everyone about this modified structure that we're using because our simple approach to most of these farms for the 2026 crop year is going to be exactly the same as we used last year. And I think it's also important to highlight the role of crop insurance. In these cases, one of the reasons we feel so confident in taking this approach, which is a little bit like gambling on these special farms, is their strong history of high production. Since insurance coverage is largely based on historical yields, we're able to secure relatively high levels of insurance. To give you an example of this, if one of our crops that's insured is wiped out by some strange disease or whatever, the insurance allows us to recover the amount of capital that we put into these farms. It's nice to know that the downside is covered. Our goal is still to eventually transition these leases back to more traditional structures with fixed base rents. But our ability to do so will depend on many external factors such as crop productions, crop prices, interest rates, input costs of growing the nuts or whatever strawberries, and water availability. We've kind of got the last one covered to some degree, water availability, as you probably read in the newspapers and reports. Water is plentiful in California, and the amount of snow in the mountains, which will melt during the summer and run off is in pretty good shape. In other leasing activity, we executed 5 renewals during the quarter. We saw a modest increase of about 7% on two of these row crops as a renewal. For three permanent crops, we reduced the fixed base rent in exchange for an additional crop share component, which is what we've done a lot of time. We should have roughly flat compared to those prior leases on those farms. Looking ahead, we have 5 leases scheduled to expire over the next 6 months. In total, this represents about 3.6% of our total 2025 lease revenue. We're currently in discussions with existing tenants and prospective new tenants about leasing each of these farms. I'm pretty optimistic about getting those rented. Now I'll take a quick update of some of the ongoing tenancy matters that we're working through. We currently have 9 farms that are wholly or partially vacant, and we're growing crops on some of these. Encompassing 4 of the farms, we've been direct operators under management agreements with unrelated third-party growers. We also recognize revenue on a cash basis for leases with 3 tenants who collectively lease about 5 of our farms. That should be okay. We are actively working towards a solution for each of these situations. We think we are close to having a resolution in place for a few of these farms soon, and hopefully, we can get some of them off this list over the next few months. I'm going to stop here. We've got Bill Reiman on the call, and Bill is the man who really understands us since he's been working in the farming area for most of his career. So Bill, take it away.

William Reiman, Farm Manager

Thank you, David, and good morning to everybody. Yes, much of our current management focus right now is on the properties that are being operated under these modified lease agreements or farmed directly utilizing third-party farm operators. We've completed the harvest for 2025, and we're pleased to report that the overall yield objectives that we had in our budgets exceeded all of that. So really good results there. We're renewing some of these modified lease arrangements, particularly on 5 of the 8 farms. 2 of the remaining 3 are redevelopment projects, and the last one, our wine grape vineyard in Napa, is now leased to a local grower, so we're happy to have that done. The 5 farms that we're renewing agreements on were really our top performers from this group last year, so we expect another really strong year of results. The winter, David touched on a little bit about some recent weather. The winter for us has been about average for precipitation with a couple of our wettest months left to come. Recently, we've had some major storms that really boosted the snowpack levels. So there's significant optimism that the surface water allocations for 2026 will be very strong. Those reservoirs, both state and federal water projects, are above historical averages. So for the short term, there's plenty of supply. Chilling hours, we're projecting a low to medium level of chilling hours this winter in California, which means we should meet all chill requirements in all our permanent crop locations. So that's very good news. Almond bloom, as of today, we're probably 2/3 complete. The bloom has been a bit uneven. There have been reports of flash bloom in many locations around the Central Valley. Also, with the cold and rainy weather, the bee activity hasn't been consistent in quite a few areas. This could possibly cause almond yields to be lower across the state. Pistachios and wine grapes, of course, are still in dormancy. They've actually reaped the benefit of some of this colder wet weather and haven't had the bloom exposed yet. Markets, tariff drama, and trade tensions still exist as we all read the headlines. However, crop markets seem to have settled in and accepted this uncertainty to a large degree. Nut crop markets continue to show notable resilience and strength, particularly for pistachios. The important story lately is the fact that the supply chain seems to be pretty light. There's minimal product in both almond and pistachio buyer side supply chains, which we think has provided upward pressure on pricing. As a result, our base guaranteed price for the current crop remains consistent with 2024, and we believe there's a strong likelihood that the final price for the 2025 crop will actually be higher than our final 2024 pricing. One of our processors, in fact, recently announced an extra $0.50 per pound bonus to be paid with our scheduled April crop payment for pistachios for the 2025 crop, and that's really good news. This momentum could also result in a higher base price for the 2026 crop when that gets announced in July of this year. So things are looking up for pistachios. Almond prices dipped in January, but since then, they've rebounded quite a bit and are climbing again as we move through boom season. I don't expect these prices to vary too much as there's strong demand and confidence in the market. There will be some slight bouncing around as projections for the 2026 crop start to come out, and we reach this point in bloom, and everybody has an opinion on what the crop is going to do. So we will definitely see that reflected in the market. But in general, the market is severely underbought, and the supply chain is light. Growers are reluctant to sell right now, so those are all things that continue to put upward pressure on almond prices. The wine grape market continues to underperform, but we're beginning to see some varietals, particularly some white grape varieties, that are showing up short in supply. At the moment, this isn't causing any increase in prices or providing any incentive for wineries to contract for supply, but it is the very first encouraging sign that we've seen in a couple of years. Vineyard removals are continuing at a rapid pace in California and really around the world. So we're hopeful that this pullback in supply will soon bring the market back into balance, likely flipping it the opposite way and will be underproduced. The weakening dollar, as long as it continues to weaken, works in our favor, making our products more attractive to international buyers. Circling back to water, we're experiencing a normal to potentially wet year as far as precipitation is concerned. It's really good news that we're continuing to experience an extended wet period. 4 out of the last 5 years or 5 out of the last 6 years have been average or wet. Full reservoirs, good rainfall, and snowpack are all key factors for the water market to be full of water for sale at prices that are attractive for our water banking activities. We're working hard to identify the best water deals for our properties and looking for infrastructure improvements that will yield us the best return on those capital expenditures. Our goal, as always, remains to further strengthen the overall water security of the entire portfolio through long-term and short-term strategic water purchases. We're looking to continue investing in water delivery system, storage infrastructure, pipelines, water banks, and identifying opportunities to create synergies across the farm assets. Now I'll turn it over to our CFO, Lewis Parrish.

Lewis Parrish, CFO

Thanks, Bill, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with a brief update on our recent financing activity. During the quarter, we repaid a $4 million note that was secured by a property that we also sold during the period. Subsequent to year-end, we redeemed our Series D term preferred stock to avoid a step-up in the coupon from 5% to 8%. That redemption was funded through a combination of common stock issued under our ATM program and a draw on our line of credit. Since the beginning of the fourth quarter, we raised about $50 million of common stock through our ATM program, with the majority of those proceeds used to fund that redemption. Turning to our operating results. For the fourth quarter, we recorded net income of about $4.2 million and a net loss to common shareholders of $1.8 million or $0.05 per share. For the year, we recorded net income of $13.5 million and a net loss to common shareholders of $10.5 million or $0.29 per share. Adjusted FFO for the fourth quarter was $14.4 million or $0.38 per share compared to $3.4 million or $0.09 per share in the same quarter last year. For the year, AFFO was $14.4 million or $0.39 per share compared to $16 million or $0.47 per share last year. The decreases in AFFO were primarily driven by the recent changes to lease structures on certain farms, timing differences in revenue recognition related to crop sales in certain directly operated farms, lost revenue from farm sales over the past year, and ongoing tenancy issues that have led to vacancies resulting in both lower revenues and higher costs. Year-over-year, fixed base cash rents decreased by about $1.9 million for the quarter and by about $19.8 million for the full year. This is primarily driven by the reasons just mentioned, but mainly the lease modifications on certain properties where we reduced or eliminated fixed base rents or in some cases provided cash lease incentives in exchange for significantly increasing the crop share components. Partially offsetting that and largely for the same reason, participation rents increased by about $9.3 million on a quarterly basis and by $10.6 million for the full year. This increase was further driven by stronger pistachio pricing compared to last year. Net profit from crop sales in our directly operated farms was about $2.6 million for 2025, which is our first harvest year. However, the full impact of this 2025 harvest is not yet reflected in our financial results. While we did expense a full year of growing costs, we have not yet recognized a full year of revenues, particularly on the pistachios. As David mentioned, the final marketing bonus payment for the 2025 pistachio crop will be recognized later in 2026, thus creating a timing difference compared to 2024 when this property was fully leased. In addition, we recorded about $4.4 million of termination-related revenue in 2025, including $2 million in the fourth quarter compared to 0 last year. On the expense side, our recurring cash operating expenses increased for both comparable periods. Total related party fees fell by about $200,000 for the year, primarily due to a lower base management fee resulting from recent farm sales, but was offset by a higher administration fee during the fourth quarter. Property operating expenses increased for both periods and are mainly driven by the cost of supplemental water we were required to provide on one of our properties pursuant to the lease, as well as higher insurance costs and property taxes incurred on one of our directly operated properties. G&A expenses declined in both periods, primarily due to lower professional fees incurred during the current year. One note on cash flows: cash flows from operations declined largely due to timing differences between leasing versus operating farms, which is particularly true in the first year of operations. Again, for our directly operated farms, almost all the cash for growing costs went out during 2025, while most of the cash proceeds will be received in 2026. Additionally, regarding the increased participation rents from the lease modifications, a significant portion of the cash payments is expected to be received in early 2026, creating another year-over-year timing difference in operating cash flows. Turning to liquidity, we have about $85 million in immediately available capital and over $185 million of unpledged properties that can be used as additional collateral. We are in discussions with a couple of lenders to add certain properties to either existing or new facilities. Currently, about 98% of our borrowings are at fixed rates with a weighted average interest rate of 3.39% locked in for another 2.7 years. This has helped shield us from the interest rate volatility we've seen over the past few years. Looking ahead, we have about $17 million of scheduled principal amortization payments due over the next 12 months. We don't have any loans maturing over the next year, but we do have about $160 million of loans with fixed rate terms that are scheduled to reset over the next 12 months, though the loans themselves are not maturing. This includes $135 million of loans under the MetLife facility that are scheduled to reprice in January of 2027. Finally, regarding our common distributions, in January, we declared a monthly dividend of $0.0467 per share for the first quarter of 2026. At our current stock price of $11.51, this represents a 4.9% annualized yield, which is above the REIT sector average. With that, I'll turn it back over to David.

David Gladstone, President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Lewis. Good report. Nice to know that we're in a strong capital position. We are staying active in the market, so we're ready to go if a good acquisition opportunity comes along. But as mentioned earlier, we're still being cautious on the acquisition front because our cost of capital remains very high. Overall demand for prime farmland growing berries and vegetables remains stable across most of our regions, particularly along the coast. We also started seeing some signs of improvements in pricing and broader economics around those crops. We are hopeful that the worst may be behind us, but it's still too early to say whether we are fully in the clear or not. Overall, in the long run, we expect inflation, particularly in the food sector, to continue to move higher, and we're expecting the values of underlying farmland to increase over time as a result. We do expect this to especially be true with healthy foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables and nuts like we grow for people, and we are a big producer these days. Now I'll open it up to some questions from those who are listening in. Operator, would you come on, please, and show them how they can ask some questions.

Operator, Operator

Our first question comes from Craig Kucera with Lucid Capital Markets.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

I wanted to revisit your commentary regarding the 5 repositioned farms. So basically, are you saying that they're under similar leases where there won't be any base rents and you'll have a portion of higher participation rent expected in '26, and then will some of that carry into 2027 as we saw this past year? Or how should we think about that?

Lewis Parrish, CFO

Yes, that's exactly right. It will have a similar structure, meaning there may be no base rent or possibly some lease incentives, just like we had in 2025. For the 2025 crop, we recorded a significant amount of revenue in that year, with some carryover into 2026, and we'll see the same in 2026. We will benefit from the carryover of the 2025 crop along with the initial payment from the 2026 crop.

William Reiman, Farm Manager

And to add to that, it won't carry into '27. It will be just like most of it. Most of the '26 crops, revenue will come in '27. So it won't be a little bit. It will be just like this year.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

Okay. When you restructured those leases, you estimated that about 75% of the revenue would be realized in the fourth quarter of 2025. Looking at the bigger picture, I understand you still have some marketing efforts for the pistachios. What percentage do you think was recognized in the fourth quarter of 2025, and what are your expectations for 2026?

Lewis Parrish, CFO

It really depends on each individual farm. For pistachio farms, we estimate that the first-year percentage will be around 65% to 75%, though this is based on our projections for the marketing bonus, which could end up being higher. If it is, that would lead to a higher percentage in the following year. Almonds are a different situation since some of our properties are part of a call pool, allowing us to choose when to sell the crops. For instance, we have one property for the '25 crop where we haven't made a decision yet because prices are trending upward, and we prefer to wait and capitalize on that. For pistachios, the estimated percentage should generally remain consistent, assuming the bonus payment keeps at its current level. However, there are indications that it might actually be higher, which would also increase the percentage in the next year. Bill, do you have anything to add?

William Reiman, Farm Manager

Yes. I mean that's correct. Certainly, on pistachios, we feel the likelihood of increased bonus payments is increasing every day. So we feel pretty strong about that. Lewis mentioned the almonds on the call pool, one particular farm, we decided to make the call of when we'll sell, and we're kind of holding out for some higher almond prices. But in that particular farm, we did get a crop insurance payout, so we're already in positive territory as far as whether we made money or lost money on that farm. But we still have a small amount of crop to sell, and we're just holding out for higher prices.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

Got it. And just one more on this topic. I guess, are you saying then that you would probably recognize more sort of variable payments throughout the year than you typically would because you have more control over when and at what price you sell the crop? Or should we think about this that this will mostly be recognized in the fourth quarter as far as what was earned in 2025?

Lewis Parrish, CFO

I think we'll have a little more in the first half of the year than we typically do. Just as Bill mentioned, we do have one pistachio processor who announced they will pay a portion of that marketing bonus early in April. So we will probably be able to pull some of that into Q1. But other than situations like that or maybe further adjustments to almond pricing, we would probably see the bulk of it coming in Q3 and especially Q4 again.

William Reiman, Farm Manager

The ongoing trend in the pistachio market and an increase in our guaranteed base price will enhance the total amount we can claim within this calendar year. However, we won't have clarity on this until around the end of July.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

Okay. Changing gears, Lou, what are your expectations for interest paid for this year in the first quarter?

Lewis Parrish, CFO

I'd expect it to be anywhere from 10% to 15% less than what we recognized in 2025, and that's assuming the percentage of interest that gets paid, that gets refunded is the same, but reflecting just the loan balance decrease over the past year as we've paid off some loans.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

Got it. I see you raised $33 million in ATM this quarter. Was the remainder of the Series D funded with cash on the balance sheet or the line of credit?

Lewis Parrish, CFO

Line of credit. We currently have about $10 million outstanding on the line of credit, and that's currently at a 5.69% variable rate.

Craig Kucera, Analyst

Got it. Okay. Just one more for me. I know one of your competitors has been generating significantly higher returns through lending to farmers and is seeing decent demand there. Given the somewhat tougher farming economy, is that something you guys are looking at a little harder? I believe you capped that type of activity to 5% of assets, but would just like to get your read on that situation.

Lewis Parrish, CFO

We've had discussions about getting a loan program started up, but we haven't pulled the trigger yet. It's something that we may continue to discuss. But at this point, we don't have any plans to put that program into action yet.

William Reiman, Farm Manager

I'll add to that. I was just going to say, I would say long-term, that's something we're really keeping an eye on. But I think just current economic conditions, we've looked at some loan deals, but with current economic conditions, we haven't felt that the risk-return profile was right for us at this time. But it's something that we continue to look at, continue to get inquiries, and probably long-term is something we want to, we'll eventually make some moves on.

David Gladstone, President and Chief Executive Officer