Why Farmland With Centuries of Water Is the Ultimate Scarce Asset | John Farris of LandFund Partners on Super El Niño, Food Security, and the Sources of Alpha in Farmland

September 11, 2026

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Farmland With Centuries of Water Is the Ultimate Scarce Asset

Global food stockpiles have fallen from 110 days of supply a decade ago to roughly 70 days today. That means if the world stopped growing crops tomorrow, we would run out of food in just over two months. This is happening because the world's arable land base is shrinking while the global appetite for protein—which requires three to five times more grain to produce than direct grain consumption—keeps rising. John Farris, founder of LandFund Partners, has been tracking this tension since the 1990s when he worked as an agricultural economist at the World Bank, watching 200 million people per year in East Asia move from one meal with protein per day to two. "Once populations move up the protein scale," Farris notes, "they rarely move back down without massive unrest, civil war, or other negative attributes."

The Water Advantage That Compounds Over Centuries

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What you'll learn

1 (00:03) **Episode Introduction: The Structural Farmland Thesis** - Jack Farley frames the episode around the shrinking global arable land base, rising protein demand, and the near-term catalyst of a potential super El Niño with thin grain reserves.
2 (01:56) **John Farris's World Bank Origin Story** - Farris explains how his time at the World Bank in the 1990s shaped his long-term view on food security and the protein demand shift.
3 (04:30) **The Shrinking Global Food Buffer** - Farris quantifies the tightening global food supply, noting that world food stocks have fallen from 110 days of consumption to roughly 70 days over the past decade.
4 (06:37) **Case Study: California's Rice Collapse** - Farris uses California's dramatic reduction in rice acreage as a concrete example of water-driven supply loss.
5 (09:00) **The Productivity Plateau** - Farris addresses the critical question of whether agricultural technology can continue to offset land and water constraints.
6 (11:11) **The Mississippi Alluvial Aquifer Advantage** - Farris explains why his fund concentrates on irrigated land above this specific aquifer, framing it as a superior long-term resource compared to the Midwest or California.
7 (13:51) **Crop Diversity as a Risk Mitigator** - Farris explains that the mid-South's ability to grow 10-20 different crops provides a critical advantage over the Midwest's corn-soybean duopoly.

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Show Notes

Learn more about LandFund Partners: https://landfundpartners.com/invest#get-started

Jack Farley speaks with John Farris, founder & CEO of LandFund Partners and former World Bank agricultural economist, about the tightening global food equation — and where the return actually comes from in farmland.

The setup: if the world stopped growing crops tomorrow, John says there are roughly 70 days of food in reserve, down from 110 a decade ago. Two billion more people, more protein per capita, less arable land, and productivity gains that have flattened out. Into that comes a Super El Niño that John's heat maps suggest will hit Brazil, Argentina, and India — the last of which depends on the monsoon to grow the world's most-consumed calorie: rice. Commodity futures prices have risen significantly this year.

That's the backdrop. The investment argument rests on three things.The first is a value that sits on no balance sheet. Across most of the eastern US there are no formal water rights, so LandFund carries its water at zero. In the Colorado River states, where those rights did develop, they've compunded at roughly 11% a year over the past thirty-five years, outpacing the S&P 500 over that time period.John argues the same legal framework is coming to the Mid-South within ten years, pushed by the hyperscalers already knocking on his door for water offsets — and that when it arrives, a line item currently marked at nothing gets marked at something.

The second leg is convergence. When LandFund started in 2013, Midwest row crop farmland traded roughly 140% above comparable Mid-South ground; today the gap is 80–100%. John's argument is that the gap should be zero, and that it inverts: land with 300 years of water, 93% irrigation, and the ability to rotate between ten and twenty crops is worth more than land that is high-quality soil but weather-dependent — not less. Iowa bets on rain. He doesn't have to.

The third is operational. LandFund required regenerative practices in its lease agreements since 2021, and John walks through the J-curve economics: $50–100 an acre and a couple of lean years up front, then lower fertilizer use, fewer passes across the field, less irrigation, and net income he estimates runs 30–40% higher than it otherwise would — which flows straight into rents, which flow into rents.

Also covered: the "dirty secret" of powering data centers using 100x the water they consume, riparian rights and what happens when states start metering overuse, what the One Big Beautiful Bill did to price floors through 2032, solar developers paying 3x farmland value for ground with transmission lines, and why US row crop farmland has been negatively correlated to both stocks and bonds.

Disclaimer: This episode is a fireside chat sponsored by LandFund Partners. Any data, statistics, or information discussed is for informational