Jacob Israelow is the founder of Dirt Capital Partners, an investment platform that partners with regenerative farmers and ranchers to help them secure long-term access to the land they farm—and ultimately own it. He left Goldman Sachs and returned to the New York area in 2012, bringing a background in real estate and investing and a growing interest in local food systems. After spending about a year talking to hundreds of farmers, land trusts and others across the Northeast, he built Dirt Capital around a simple question: could investment capital help good farmers become landowners without taking value away from them?
The mechanic at the heart of Dirt Capital is a lease-purchase model. The fund buys a piece of farmland alongside one specific farmer or rancher, signs a ten-year lease with a purchase option locked in at a pre-agreed price at year five and again at year ten, and lets that farmer buy the land back once their business, and their balance sheet, have caught up. It is a way to get farmers onto land conventional lenders will not yet finance, without turning them into permanent tenants.
In this episode, Koen and Jacob dig into what sits underneath that model: how Dirt Capital manages real estate risk while leaving the farm business risk to the farmer, why regenerative practices do not automatically make land worth more, what happens when a purchase does not go to plan, and how a firm that has put roughly $80 million to work over the past decade is about to try to raise $100 million for its next fund.
