Bradford’s Farmland LP project on CNBC Mad Money
March 30, 2015
Post Carbon Board Member Jason Bradford’s Farmland LP venture was featured on CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer.
From the article:
READ FULL ARTICLECramer was inspired when he saw a TED talk by Ali Partovi and knew he had to interview him for “Mad Money.” Partovi is a visionary angel investor, startup advisor and serial entrepreneur who has previously co-founded and sold two high-profile start-ups. He was also one of the first investors who saw the potential in Facebook.
Partovi has recently embraced a new venture for Farmland LP. This is a company that buys regular cropland and makes it more profitable by turning it organic. In the TED talk that Cramer saw, Partovi spoke about how organic farming is actually more profitable, more efficient and less expensive than industrial agriculture.
The larger the scale, the less this is the case. The highest profits per acre in the absolute are made from 1-, 2-, 3-acre plots. (But those can’t easily be commodified to turn a profit for third parties.)
Organic agriculture still has a huge capacity for killing soil micro-organisms, creating compaction, and adding to soil loss via tillage. The poisons they use are still poisons. They have the same issues with irrigation and water loss through evaporation in broadacre annual systems. Monocropping still creates big problems for soil health and diversity and gives no harbor to pollinators who, if they were to stick around, would only be given one ‘meal’ per season or per year.
oh, and transportation remains problematic.