Thank you all for joining us this morning. My name is William Shellmyer. I'm with Three Part Advisors, and I have the pleasure of introducing Farmer Mac, trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AGM. Presenting on behalf of the company today is Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Aparna Ramesh.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Really, a pleasure to be here with you all. I'll take a little bit of time just to walk through the presentation, give you a sense of, you know, who we are, when we were founded, and what some of our investment highlights are. Feel free to stop me if you'd like to ask me any questions. Otherwise, we can just save questions to the very end, so let me just go right to, you know, why invest in Farmer Mac? You know, as mentioned, you know, we are a New York Stock Exchange-traded company. We were founded in the late 1980s via a farm credit crisis.
Really, we are essentially government-sponsored but publicly traded, and it gets a little bit into, you know, why we were founded, how we were founded, and what some of our unique advantages are. Essentially, you know, the way you might think about us, you know, we raise money from debt and equity markets, and we provide a very frictionless way to lend that into the rural economy. We focus on a few different sectors within the rural economy. We look at farm and ranch, which is predominantly production agriculture. The second area that we really focus on is commercial operators of farmland, and that's a much smaller portion of our portfolio, but that's essentially the agricultural segment.
The second big segment that we focus on within the rural economy is rural infrastructure, and within that, we focus on utilities, we focus on renewable energy, and we also have started to increase our footprint in broadband financing, and I'll talk more about that. You know, growth is a huge component of who we are. If you go back to our history, what you'll see is a fairly homogeneous profile in terms of how we loaned our money, and it was concentrated predominantly on production agriculture.
But with change in management, with new management coming on board in the last several years, we've really taken on a sort of both a value as well as a growth position by diversifying our revenue streams into these new segments, like renewable energy, like broadband financing, going into more commercial syndicated lending opportunities. You know, we have a very, very consistent performance. We have a net effective spread. For those of you who are familiar with banks, think of our net effective spread as really our top-line revenue, and that has stayed very consistent over time. You know, I talked about the fact that when we were created, we were created by the U.S. government. Congress really put us in place in the late 1980s.
So we have a mission. We have a very specific mandate, but very similar to other GSEs. We were created to provide a specific set of value and financing to a constituent base, and this is the farm economy and the rural economy. We were expected to function independently as a profit-making enterprise, traded on the New York Stock Exchange and operating in debt markets to really finance our balance sheet. You know, we have extremely low financing costs. You know, unlike depository institutions, we're not a bank. We raise money through debt capital markets, and we actually issue debt at all points on the curve: short, medium-term, and long-term. And we finance our entire $28 billion through these debt instruments.
Very recently, we've also tapped the securitization market, and I'm happy to talk more about that. That's a relatively small portion of how we finance our balance sheet, but it's incredibly accretive, from a return on equity standpoint, and it also provides a very good diversification mechanism for us, in terms of really financing our balance sheet on the long end of the curve. You know, we're a mission-based organization, high integrity. Values are very important to us. And when I think about, you know, our growth strategy, it's rooted in innovation. You'll see that we're gonna start to make a lot more technology investments. You know, and mission is incredibly important to every single employee within our company, and very recently, we've also enhanced our benefits offerings to include Equity for All.
Every single employee owns a share of the company. You know, so who are we, and why were we created, and when were we created? I talked about the 1980's. In 1988 , Farmer Mac was initially chartered as a typical agency. The reason we were created just goes back a little bit to, you know, the environment in the '80s. It was an era of extremely high inflation. There were trade issues and trade embargoes. There was some stress within the primary lending arm to farmers with some mispricing that occurred and asset liability management issues, et cetera. All of this led to a farm credit crisis with commodity prices going down and land values really plummeting.
So this led Congress to really create a secondary market, i.e., Farmer Mac, and this goes back to our history, which is, you know, public-sponsored, but tapping private markets, equity, and debt, to really finance our balance sheet. Over time, our charter has really expanded. Initially, we offered credit protection products to other lending institutions, but this inherent advantage that we have in terms of asset liability management and being able to finance our balance sheet through debt allows us to really work with a nationwide set of lenders, so community banks, non-bank financial institutions, insurance companies, and we can lend on all points in the curve, something that, say, your typical community banking organization can't do. Why can't they do that?
The reason is, if a farmer comes to them and says, "I want a thirty-year mortgage," the collateral is the farmland, then they have to actually lend using very short-term instruments, and it creates a lot of interest rate risk. That is the fundamental competitive advantage that we have, which is we can lend on all points on the curve, at... and we can do that through match funding the duration of our assets and our liabilities. And so why is that important? It ends up creating a very consistent revenue stream that's essentially locked in every time we make a loan. So these are long-duration assets, and you've got a spread that is essentially locked in over the term of that, and we continue to roll those over and make that.
You know, sort of play out year after year with a growth rate of anywhere from 6-8%. So you can see where we've, you know, come along from the 1980s to today. In addition to the fundamental product that I talked about, which is farm and ranch, we've also seen a tremendous expansion in terms of our charter. We were able to hold loans on balance sheet. When we were first created, we were created with a view that as a typical and traditional secondary market, we would securitize our offerings. But with our debt advantages and this expansion of being able to hold loans on balance sheet, essentially, we can operate with this net interest margin or net effective spread.
In 2008 , we had another expansion, and we went into the segment that I talked about, which is rural infrastructure. So today, we have nearly $30 billion, and we're spread out across the country with over 100 commodities and in almost every single state. And this offers us and offers prospective shareholders a tremendous amount of diversification and de-risking in terms of our offerings. So a little bit about the management team. Brad Nordholm is our President and CEO. Brad comes with just a wealth of, frankly, industry expertise, both in terms of agriculture as well as in rural infrastructure. Renewable energy was really his brainchild when he came in.
He took a look at some of our offerings and really pushed us to think big and to think about commercializing our strategy. He came from Starwood, where he was really the founding CEO of Starwood Energy. And Brad has been with us, been with the company since 2018 . Brad took a look at his management team and made a couple of key hires. He's really expanded the executive team. We've highlighted two other executives here. Zach Carpenter, who's the Chief Business Officer, leads our commercialization strategies. He comes from CoBank and Goldman Sachs. And then Brad hired me in 2019 , and I spent a decade plus at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, spent about a decade prior to that in commercial banking.
Very attracted to Farmer Mac because of all the reasons that I'm here talking to you about why Farmer Mac is an excellent company. One is, you know, I was really amazed by our credit performance and our credit history just as a lender. I mean, we had sustained maybe a basis point of losses per year every year, and, you know, we have a handful of loans that we've really charged off on. And a lot of that comes down to our fundamental values and how we really underwrite our portfolio. The second thing that really drew me to the opportunity was the vision and the opportunity to diversify into new revenue streams, in addition to the core product, which is agriculture and food security.
So, that plus the fact that we're traded on the New York Stock Exchange, we have this incredible competitive advantage, as well as, you know, what I would call a very, very lean footprint. For all the reasons, you know, I was drawn to the company, you know, and to come and be its CFO. You know, how does Farmer Mac really play in the larger agricultural mortgage market? I think this is an important piece of information for those of you who are not familiar with agriculture. If you think about the total addressable market, you know, that's out there, think of it as about $4 trillion. Our mandate really limits us to real estate financing, which is about $3.4 trillion.
If you think about farmers and ranchers, they tend to be extremely debt-averse, so it's not a very leveraged sector, and so you can see ag real estate, the debt-to-asset ratio is about 10.4%. And of that, you know, we really try to not think about ourselves in terms of market share, because as a secondary market, but we're it, right? Essentially, we own about 100% of everything that's out there in the secondary market. But if you look from the standpoint of 4% or so of real estate that's out there in terms of farm sector debt, that's about $355 billion, you know, think of it as we hold maybe 6% of that share. What's the competitive landscape for us, and who actually holds that $355 billion?
The Farm Credit System is a cooperative system of banks that were put in place in the 1930's. Very traditionally set up as a cooperative, regionally focused through four FCS banks, and owned by about 56 associations, farmer-owned. And then you have a wealth of sort of non-FCS agricultural lenders, insurance companies, ag banks, non-bank lenders. And then you've got Farmer Mac, which is the only secondary market that really operates in this space. You know, I touched on our operating model in my earlier comments, but you know, we operate very actively in capital markets. We have a treasury desk that issues financing at the short, medium, and long-term end of the curve.
Works with, you know, 30+ renowned dealers on Wall Street who place our paper. Obviously, we service that through debt payments as well as dividends. Our stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under AGM. That finances a portion of our capital stack, and we take all of that, and then we lend that to financial institutions that concentrate on lending activities within the segments that I talked about earlier. That's rural infrastructure, agribusiness, and farmers and ranchers. I think it's very important to mention that we are heavily regulated. We're not a bank, but we're regulated like a bank is, and we're regulated by the Farm Credit Administration that follows a lot of the same principles as, say, the OCC or the Fed.
We also aren't governed by the Senate Banking Committees, but we're governed much more by the House Agriculture and Senate Agriculture Committee, so that's definitely a nuance. So let's actually turn our attention to the numbers, and we like to think of this as our money slide. I talked about the different segments that we operate in. What you can see is the preponderance of our balance sheet is focused in the farm and ranch segment. So the farm and ranch segment, you know, think of that as individual farmers, loans that are anywhere from $800,000 to about $1.2 million. These could be concentrated in very rural communities, all across the country and span essentially commodities ranging from row crops, permanent plantings, fruit, you know, dairy, cattle, et cetera.
So we have over a 100 commodities that are financed. All of these aggregate up to about $18.5 billion, and the way it really works is you could have a farmer that's looking for a thirty-year fixed rate mortgage. They go to their local community bank. The local community bank looks at that, understands what our credit criteria is, decides not to fund that loan on their balance sheet, but sells that loan to us. If it meets our credit box, we accept that loan, and we fund it, and they get to service that loan and maintain that relationship with that borrower. So we do that over and over again. That results in about $18.5 billion.
The spread that we earn on that net effective spread is our balance for net interest margin because we take out the volatility in engaging in swaps and derivatives. I'll get into that a little bit. It's a, it's a technicality, but think of our net effective spread as really our gross profit margin. On that particular segment, it's a little shy of about a hundred basis points. Something that we really want to sort of emphasize is the amount of capital that's required on a risk-adjusted basis to really generate some of these profits. The risk-adjusted gross return on allocated capital for the farm and ranch segment is 28%.
More recently, and over the past four years with the expansion of our management team, we've really focused on an area known as corporate ag finance, and these are similar to farm and ranch loans in that the underlying collateral is farmland, but these are done more through a syndicate. So we would be part of a broader syndicate, and these wouldn't be $800,000, $1 million loans, but these could be loans that are made to large commercial operators, and we might take a portion of it, so it could be 5-$15 million. These tend to be slightly higher risk for the syndicate itself, but you can see from the net effective spread, it's almost 2X that of the farm and ranch portfolio. Because it consumes more capital, the RAG ROC is very comparable, and it's at 25%.
So that is really our agricultural finance line of business. Moving on to the rural infrastructure finance line of business, you know, we have rural utilities where we lend through a cooperative structure to rural utilities. And that is about 25% of our overall portfolio, tend to be extremely investment grade, a very low overhead, and you can see our gross return on capital on that is about 20%. More recently, with lots of tailwinds in the macro environment, we've moved into the renewable energy sector, something that we see as at the heart of our competitive advantage because we can finance long, these tend to be longer structures. And again, this is done through a syndicate. We're part of the debt financing arm. It's a very small portfolio but rapidly growing.
We think this will continue to be an area of growth for us as we look out over the horizon. Again, very accretive from a net effective spread standpoint at about 1.86%, and generates a RAG ROC of about 29%. So you add it all up together, our treasury segment is where we really finance our balance sheet. And we, when we look at this, we try to look at sort of the contribution of treasury to the net effective spread, and that tends to be about 41-45 basis points, give or take. So you add it all up on a weighted average basis, just doing the math, on a $29 billion balance sheet, we generate a net effective spread of about 1.14%.
You know, I'll talk a bit more about what's the traditional range for that. That 1.14%, if you go back several years, used to be anywhere from 85-95 basis points. We've really inched up over the years quite dramatically. Last year, we peaked at 119 basis points. We think, you know, a good average for us is anywhere between 105-114 basis points, depending upon the business composition of you know, where the loan demand really is. Okay, talked about our portfolio diversification. I won't, you know, I won't dwell on this too much, but, I did mention that a couple of times.
You know, you look at us from a commodity standpoint, you know, we've got row crops, which is the vast majority of, you know, what our commodities are concentrated in, permanent plantings, livestock, ag storage and processing, which is a little outside of the farm gate. That's a smaller portion of our entire portfolio, concentrated across all geographic regions. I think suffice to say, you know, this diversification gives us a very unique benefit. No other lender really has a national footprint in the agricultural economy the way that we do. If you look at where, the agricultural economy and the outlook has been, you know, the estimate, you know, is definitely a decrease in 2023.
But you know, it's sort of a little bit of an illusionary decline because you know, we're coming off of absolute historic highs. And so even though net cash income is forecasted to fall, you know, there have been elevated input costs, but with you know, moderating inflation profile and potentially a steepening yield curve, some of that moderation is likely to take place over the next year or two. But some of this is demand and supply. It's sort of a decline in commodity prices coming down from inflation, et cetera.
But it doesn't really impact our business too significantly, because of, you know, just our credit profile and our underwriting criteria, where we underwrite to both loan-to-value as well as debt service coverage ratio, and I'll cover that momentarily as well. I won't talk too much about this. I did mention, you know, that we finance our balance sheet through the debt capital markets. We also maintain an investment portfolio that's about a third of our overall balance sheet size. It's purely for liquidity reasons. We don't operate like a hedge fund. We're not trying to take undue risk with that. You know, we'll try to take some extension risk with it.
Over the past few years, our investment portfolio has been a huge source of profits for us, mainly because we made some really opportunistic moves to make our balance sheet more safe and sound. How did we do that? When rates were really low in 2020 , we went out, and we raised preferred capital at sub-five rates. We extended duration on our liabilities. A lot of banking institutions, you know, were really doing the opposite, right? They were chasing high quality yield and extending into treasuries at 1.18%. We were doing that on the liability side, and as a result, we had excess cash, and we ended up investing that short.
And as the Fed continued to raise interest rates, you know, that continued to reprice upwards, and that hit, you know, a peak of a 37% increase year over year in 2023. And, you know, we continued to duration match, and we continued to minimize volatility. So natural question that we get from investors is: Well, what happens when rates come down? Are you gonna start to see that really fall off? No, because we started to preemptively really hedge and give up some of those profits by extending further out on the curve, and that's kind of the tenet of how we manage our spreads. We try to minimize volatility first and try to pick up basis points second. You know, all of this results in extremely consistent and high-quality earnings.
So just to give you a descriptor of what these bar graphs are all about, the blue graph is really our gross profit margin or our net effective spread or our net interest margin if you follow banks. You know, the orange bars are really our profit and loss and our net income or our core earnings, which is a non-GAAP measure. And if you look at just, you know, what our CAGR has been, it's been incredibly consistent. 18% NES CAGR over the last four years, a 16% core CAGR or our net profit CAGR has been about 16%. Something that we're very proud of, and it's difficult to sort of match that as we look out ahead, but we intend to really pay very close attention to our metrics over a three-year period.
You know, I talked about the fact that we're not just value-oriented, we're also growth-oriented, and we've got a number of opportunities that are here, on the horizon to increase our assets under management. You know, different types of product structures. I talked about, you know, our lines of businesses, different products under that. We've got some opportunities to increase the throughput through more efficient processes, expansion of technology, so you can see, you know, something like collateral-value efficiencies, loan servicing, these all hit that, but we've also started to really securitize a lot of pools, and this is important because securitization is an important financing mechanism for us, but it's also a vehicle and a product that we can offer to counterparties as they start to face capital pressure because it's incredibly capital efficient.
You know, I will take you back to, you know, where I talked about our risk-adjusted gross return on capital being less than 30% for most of our assets. When we securitize a pool, it's so capital efficient, it yields a gross ROE of north of 150%. So it's a tremendous growth opportunity for us. And then renewable energy, which is some of the tailwinds and the macro environment, just, you know, climate issues, et cetera. We can be a really important source of financing and partnership to the debt arm for some of our partners, and we're starting to do just that. We've made some investments in headcount. We've hired some incredible talent that, you know, has ensured that we have a very robust pipeline.
So it has been and will likely be, in the short term, our fastest-growing segment. There's growing electricity demand, right? I mean, you hear about everything that's going on in the economy, from AI to crypto to what have you, puts a lot of pressure in terms of just the need for additional power. Where is that going to come from? So, you know, we can argue the merits and demerits of all of those factors, but the reality is that there is a growing need for electricity, and Farm and Ranch can play a very important role in providing financing, in that space. Rural broadband, very mission-centric for us, very important that rural communities can stay very plugged in, and that's an area where we're engaging.
So we do work through cooperatives through traditional telecom companies, but we focus on a particular niche, and that is providing broadband. Okay, so I talked about securitization. It's an incredibly unique opportunity for us. In the interest of time, I, you know, I'll probably save this more for, you know, Q&A if we have an opportunity to do that. But essentially, you know, it's a long-term source of financing for us, and we're also making a pivot into a product strategy where, you know, we won't hold those assets on balance sheet.
But we've created and structured a conduit, and we've built an investor market, both in terms of sort of a senior tranche of, you know, insurance companies and income investors, as well as risk-based investors, private equity companies, hedge funds, et cetera, that are interested in owning agriculture easily, and we've created this offering of security that they can easily include in their portfolio. So very exciting, very new for us, something that Jelka and I, and a couple of others on our team have been actively leading over the past several years. We've done about four transactions so far, intend to be in the market again in the latter half of this year with another transaction, but we can certainly talk more about that. So, you know, again, positioning for growth with securitization, you can see some of these metrics here.
You know, these tend to be very traditional structures, and, you know, we'll continue to grow the program and continue to make that pivot, as I mentioned, into a product strategy. Let's just talk a little bit about credit because that's super important, given that, you know, at the end of the day, we are a financing organization. When we think about credit and when we think about, especially the loans that we put on our balance sheet for about 75% of our portfolio, which is Farm and Ranch, we focus on loan-to-values. And if you look at our loan-to-value, it's incredibly conservative. It's anywhere between 40-45% after seasoning. You know, we look for personal guarantees, and we also look at cash flow metrics of about 1.25%.
So you couple all of this, it really brings down that loan-to-value ratio in terms of who we can actually greenlight. Because of all of these factors and the fact that, you know, when you have an owner-operated property, there's, you know, a lot of skin in the game for the end borrower, right? This is a property that's been in their business, in their home, in their family for years and years. This is something that they intend to pass down to generations. It's a place where they live. It's a place where they operate, you know, out of in terms of income. They put their personal guarantee behind it. There's a tendency to not really default, and that plays out in our credit metrics, and we tend to be very patient.
We tend to work with our borrowers through different agricultural credit cycles, and that has really worked out for us. We're certainly not a lender of last resort, and we are regulated, as I mentioned, by the Farm Credit Administration, but you know, when you really think about stressing our portfolio and trying to think about what are those default scenarios, you know, I talked about our loan-to-value and our portfolio LTV. On average, it's about 46%. If you go back to, you know, when we were founded in the 1980's , at that time there was a farm credit crisis, you know, at that time, farmland values dropped by over 20%, about 23%.
With LTVs of about 46%, you'd need to see a crisis that, you know, results in farmland values collapsing by greater than 55% for us to really even sustain a loss, right? So all of this to say that, you know, we've got, and I'll talk about capital momentarily, we've got a lot of extra capital. We've got basically an agricultural sector with farmland values really growing in the mid- to low-single digits, and we've got portfolio LTVs of about 45% on average. So when you think about all of that, we're very, very insulated from a balance sheet standpoint. We consistently outperform, no surprise, in terms of credit. You know, I'll just quickly highlight some of this data that you see over here.
When you think about banks on average, they have about 17 basis points in terms of, you know, average charge-offs. The Farm Credit System, different portfolio mix, different product mix, they have about nine basis points. Farmer Mac has had about two basis points. These are average annual rates. So as a lender, we have sustained about two basis points of losses every single year, while maintaining incredibly consistent spreads and maintaining very consistent net profits because we operate very lean. This just gives you a little bit more color on those specific credit losses that we have experienced. I mean, it's funny that it can all fit within a chart. We've had about four or five credit losses in the history, you know, that we've been in existence. We've had a predominantly idiosyncratic losses, is how we like to think of it.
You know, losses where, you know, couldn't really have been foreseen and kind of run very counter to our underwriting model. And we can get into this a little bit more. I'll just skip through this. This gets into our reserving. We follow CECL. I think it's important for you to think about, you know, our capital base. And if you look at where we are in terms of capital, I mean, we are very heavily regulated, and we follow two different, regulatory metrics. One is a very traditional leverage ratio type of metric, where, you know, it's not risk-weighted. You know, for every asset that we put on our balance sheet, we have to hold a certain amount against that. And so that's called the statutory minimum capital ratio.
And, you know, it has both an on-balance sheet as well as an off-balance sheet component to it. And then we also follow the Basel capital metrics. So, you know, based on that, you know, we have to have a minimum amount of risk-weighted asset ratios. When you look at our assets to total equity, that's around 8%, but we really try to add a buffer to it, and we try to not have a risk-weight ratio below 10%. Over the past several years, between, you know, just tapping the preferred market, low credit losses, recapitalization through retained earnings, we currently are at about $1.5 billion.
So, we essentially have, almost, you know, 40%-50% more capital than we actually need, and that allows us, to do a few things. One is, to continue to give back to our shareholders in the form of growing dividends, to continue to expand our revenue streams into areas that tend to be more capital consumptive. It allows us to be there for our constituent base, so that if there are, disruptions, if there are, credit crises, we can withstand that really effectively. So this kind of capital stack allows us to, really sustain ourselves for a very, very long time without having to worry about, you know, going into the markets to raise expensive capital, which, you know, which can be problematic.
Getting and boiling this all down into our key metrics, you know, what you can see is just consistency. When I look at the slide, I see consistency, right? If you go back to our efficiency ratio, our operating efficiency, I talked about trying to keep that below 30%. That is the only guidance we provide. On a quarter-to-quarter basis, we try to aim to be below 30%. What you see here when you go all the way back to 2019 is we've been well below that. There have been pockets when we've gone up a little bit, and that has to do with the fact that as we've scaled up some of these new lines of businesses, we've really tried to increase our headcount. Currently, we're making some technology investments.
You know, all of that could put us temporarily close to or slightly above 30%, but we, we pay very, very close attention to that. And so when you boil all of that down, I talked about our gross profit margin staying very consistent at that hundred and forty-four basis points or a little shy of that. You know, it translates into, you know, a CAGR that is also very, very consistent and very predictable. Coming all the way back to our return on equity, we set a hurdle rate for ourselves at an organizational level of greater than 14%. This is our return on book value equity. If you look at where we have been since 2019, we've ranged anywhere from 16%-19%, and last year was certainly a very high watermark for us.
We have about 185 employees. That speaks to, you know, our lean footprint, and we work as a secondary market with, you know, 700- plus financial institutions across the nation, and if you think about, you know, a particular metric that really struck me when I was contemplating this opportunity, it was, you know, net profits of around $900,000 per employee, so you know, that's really an astounding metric, and you know, again, very strong returns, and as a result, we've been able to really continue to grow our dividends, year over year. So segueing right into that, what you can see here is our current dividend yield, given, you know, where our share price is, you know, is about 2.34%.
The CAGR on our dividend in terms of growth has been north of, you know, 25%. And if you look at us, you know, comparing us to some of the major indices, S&P 500 and Russell 2000, we've really overperformed that. So in 2024, we gave back about 27%, in terms of a year-over-year increase in our dividends. And in general, we've actually increased our quarterly dividend payments pretty systematically for the last 13 years. So let me just end where I began. You know, why invest in Farmer Mac? Huge competitive advantage, unique positioning, the only secondary market, in what I would call a very countercyclical sector in terms of, you know, agriculture, food security, rural infrastructure. We finance the basics, right? Not just, are we focused on value, but we're also focused on growth.
We're able to expand into some of these new markets because we have a very safe and sound balance sheet and a growing capital stack. You know, and we also continue to invest, as I mentioned, in our employees and the talent that we've really created through our Equity for All program. So for all of these reasons, I think, you know, Farmer Mac is a very exciting place to work in and certainly a very exciting place to invest in. So with that, let me actually stop. I think we've got about, you know, a couple of minutes and happy to take questions along the chopper. Yeah.
This has nothing to do with your presentation, but with foreign entities buying up, you know, the agriculture-
Yeah.
What is your viewpoint or company's viewpoint?
I mean, you know, as a government-sponsored enterprise, we don't lend to foreign entities.
Okay.
So it has to be, you know, domestic operators, and so-
So they're not considered like a competitor?
They're not considered a competitor. I mean, they may work with non-bank financial institutions and try to buy or they might try to buy, you know, direct holdings and so on. It's very, very difficult to actually buy farmland. And, you know, so that, that's definitely a factor. I will say through our securitized transactions, by creating a security, we're very happy for international investors. In fact, we're starting a process where we want to take Farmer Mac internationally on our debt side, right? We want to bring as many investors into Farmer Mac debt holdings, and frankly, our securitizations, because that's really good for the U.S. economy. Yeah.
If you could, I think it was on slide number nine, I just, if you could explain the competitive landscape a little bit further.
Yeah.
How do you plan to grow your share of that? I think it was like $380-plus billion dollar market.
Yeah, it's about $355 billion in terms of just real estate, and then obviously, there's, you know, syndicated markets and so on. But if you just focus on sort of the real estate segment, give or take, you know, maybe we have about 5.5%-6% of that on our balance sheet. Couple of things, you know, the competitive landscape, you know, the vast majority of that is held by the direct originator, which is the Farm Credit System. It's a network of cooperative banks that hold the vast majority of that. And then you have other players like insurance companies, non-bank financials, et cetera. Farmer Mac is really a secondary market, so it's not like we can go out there and, you know, lend directly. We can't. We can't do campaigns to sort of lend directly.
We have to work with our partners and our financial institutions who will sell to us based on, you know, their asset liability management criteria. They will sell to us. Now, that said, you know, how do we expand our market share? A few things that we've done over the past few years. During a refinancing boom, prior to this management team, you know, we would just wait for the financial institutions to come to us and to give us, you know, those assets. But now we're more aggressive. We're out there promoting Farmer Mac, promoting, you know, our program, and we've included more financial institutions into the mix who are aware of the fact that there is this conduit out there. They can keep the servicing revenue, and they can de-risk themselves by selling that loan to us.
So that's been one way in which we've expanded our market share. The second way in which we've expanded our market share has been through these syndicated offerings, being part of syndicates, which allows us to grow our portfolio more quickly than doing loans that are just a million or two million in size. The third thing, which I think is very exciting, and it's a huge strategic opportunity for us, and it's gonna be a focus for us, is securitization. Because you know, as Basel and as capital regimes start to get more constrained, there's gonna be more pressure on banking institutions, for example, to start to offload these capital consumptive pools.
And so if they have a conduit to do that in, which is securitization, and we can find a fairly de-risked market while holding high-quality collateral and guaranteeing a portion of that ourselves, then that's a way for us, maybe not to grow our assets on balance sheet, but to grow our assets under management.
If I could, just one more. It looks like the farmland, the debt to asset ratio. I mean, it seems like a massively underleveraged asset class compared to, like, the durable characteristics. And I know a bunch of coming from a farming community, a lot of people take out loans on equipment. They can probably borrow against their land and use that cash to purchase the equipment in much better terms.
That's right.
You guys, are you guys educating farmers on that?
Yeah, I mean, farmers are incredibly savvy, and they're very good financial planners. They do exactly what you said. You know, one of our colleagues likes to call it the land is their checking account. And, you know, they tend to tap into that equity to buy other properties, to buy equipment, to finance it that way. And, you know, and we'll work with them, you know, certainly to do that. And so we'll have equity lines on top of their... You know, we'll be the first lien on all of it, but that's exactly what happens because they have so much equity at, you know, 46%. They can really leverage a lot of their, you know, their holdings to do exactly what you mentioned. Well, great. Oh, there's one more? Yeah.
The potential unrealized capital gains tax, have you thought about how that could affect your business?
Do you mean the tax structure changing potentially from 21% to 28%, or the-
There's a potential.
Oh
... tax on unrealized capital gains.
Yeah.
That supposedly hurts farmers quite a bit.
So I think, farmers are supposedly exempt from that.
Yeah.
That was what was contemplated, you know, in the original bill. But that is complex because there's a whole step-down basis for it. But my understanding is that, you know, it does exclude, you know, farmers. Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Great! Thank you very much.