9 Farmland Investing Platforms and Funds Compared

Updated September 1, 2026. This article is information, not financial advice. Every figure below was checked against a primary or dated source on the day of publication, and the sources are listed at the bottom.

Most farmland investing platforms in the United States are closed to you unless you are an accredited investor. That is the first thing to settle, because it removes five of the nine options on this page for most readers. AcreTrader, FarmTogether, Farmland LP, FarmFundr and LandFund Partners all require accreditation, with per-deal minimums that run from roughly $10,000 to $50,000. The routes open to everyone are narrower and cheaper: two farmland real estate investment trusts you can buy in any brokerage account for the price of one share, one lending platform with a $100 minimum, and one Regulation CF platform starting around $5,000. Farmland is also not the one-way escalator the older version of this page implied. The NCREIF Total Farmland Index returned 0.20% in 2025, its capital component negative.

Which farmland investing platforms and funds can you actually use?

Nine vehicles are worth knowing, and they split cleanly by who is allowed in. The table sorts them that way rather than by a ranking, because accreditation decides your list before anything else does.

Platform or fund	Open to	Typical minimum	What you own	Liquidity
Farmland Partners (FPI)	Anyone with a brokerage account	One share, $10.29 on Aug 31, 2026	Shares in a listed farmland REIT	Daily, on the NYSE
Gladstone Land (LAND)	Anyone with a brokerage account	One share, $9.18 on Aug 31, 2026	Shares in a listed farmland REIT	Daily, on the Nasdaq
Steward	Non-accredited investors	$100	A promissory note, not land	Fixed loan term
Harvest Returns	Non-accredited on many Reg CF deals	About $5,000	Debt or equity in an agriculture project	Held to term
AcreTrader	Accredited investors only	$10,000 to $25,000 per farm	Shares in a single-farm LLC	None; 5 to 10 year hold
FarmTogether	Accredited investors only	$15,000 crowdfunded, $50,000 fund	Fractional farm stakes or fund units	Held to term
Farmland LP	Accredited investors only	Fund-level, six figures	Units in a regenerative farmland fund	Held to term
FarmFundr	Accredited investors only	Deal-dependent	Equity in California specialty-crop farms	Held to term
LandFund Partners	Accredited investors only	Fund-level, six figures	Units in a Mid-South farmland fund	Held to term

Do you need to be an accredited investor to buy farmland?

For the fractional-ownership platforms, yes. For farmland as an asset class, no. The distinction matters because the platforms that market hardest are the ones with the accreditation gate.

The Securities and Exchange Commission defines an accredited natural person as someone who earned more than $200,000 in each of the prior two years, or $300,000 together with a spouse or spousal equivalent, and reasonably expects the same this year; or who has a net worth above $1 million excluding the value of a primary residence; or who holds certain professional certifications. Those thresholds are set out in the SEC’s accredited investor bulletin on Investor.gov.

Platforms rely on that rule because they sell securities under Regulation D, which does not require SEC registration but does restrict who can buy. Nothing about a farm makes it riskier for a household earning $80,000 than for one earning $400,000. The gate is a securities rule, not a judgment about the land.

How can non-accredited investors invest in farmland?

Three routes are open without accreditation, and only one of them gives you a claim on land itself.

The listed farmland REITs are the first route. Two US REITs own farms and lease them to operators. Buying a share makes you a part-owner of the portfolio, priced daily, sellable in seconds. This is the closest thing to a farmland index fund that exists for a retail investor, and it is where our guide to farmland REITs goes into the individual holdings.

The second route is lending. Steward lends to regenerative farms, ranches and local food producers, with a minimum of $100 and no accreditation requirement. You hold a promissory note and earn interest. You do not own an acre, and if a borrower fails you are an unsecured or partly secured lender rather than a landowner. Published rates have ranged from roughly 6% on a pooled product to as high as 10% on individual loans, and the company’s own materials have quoted different figures for different products, so check the current term sheet before committing rather than trusting any number in an article, including this one.

The third route is Regulation CF. Harvest Returns, founded in Fort Worth in October 2016, runs debt and equity offerings across greenhouses, livestock and specialty crops. Minimums start around $5,000 and many deals are sold under Regulation CF, which is open to non-accredited investors. The trade-off is concentration: you are backing one operation, not a diversified portfolio.

What do the two farmland REITs actually pay?

Farmland Partners yields about 3.5% and Gladstone Land about 6.1%, and the gap tells you something about each company’s position rather than which is the better buy.

	Farmland Partners (FPI)	Gladstone Land (LAND)
Exchange	NYSE	Nasdaq
Close, Aug 31, 2026	$10.29	$9.18
Distribution	$0.09 per quarter	$0.0467 per month
Annualised	$0.36	$0.5604
Yield at that close	About 3.5%	About 6.1%
Payment record	Raised the dividend 50% in 2026	159 consecutive monthly payments to July 2026
Recent direction	Sold 60 farms and its brokerage arm in 2025, redeemed its remaining Series A preferred units	Shifting toward crop-share leases, which raises earnings seasonality

Read the higher yield as a question, not a reward. Published 2026 analyses of Gladstone Land have flagged distribution coverage, tenant concentration and rising operating costs, and at least one has argued for a reset to about $0.30 a share. That is analyst opinion rather than a company statement, and Gladstone publishes its declared rate on its own dividend page, which is the figure to check before you buy. Farmland Partners took the opposite path: it sold weaker assets in 2025, simplified its balance sheet, and used the proceeds to raise its dividend by half.

What returns has farmland actually produced?

Farmland had a rare down year in 2025, and any page that shows you only the long-run average is hiding it. The NCREIF Total Farmland Index returned 0.20% for 2025, made up of a -2.80% capital return and a 3.05% income return, according to AgIS Capital’s March 2026 summary of NCREIF’s fourth-quarter data. The Annual Cropland Index posted 3.52%, its lowest total return since inception.

Underlying land values told a different story, which is the part worth understanding. The USDA’s 2026 Land Values Summary put average US farm real estate at $4,500 per acre, up 3.4% on 2025; cropland at $6,020 per acre, up 3.3% and above $6,000 for the first time on record; and pasture at $2,000 per acre, up 4.2%. The full release is published by USDA NASS.

Measure	2026 value	Change on prior year
Farm real estate, all land and buildings	$4,500 per acre	+3.4%
Cropland	$6,020 per acre	+3.3%
Pasture	$2,000 per acre	+4.2%
NCREIF Total Farmland Index, 2025 total return	0.20%	Capital -2.80%, income +3.05%

Two numbers, two messages. Appraised land kept appreciating modestly while the institutional index went nowhere, because the index also carries transaction marks, permanent-crop write-downs and the cost of higher interest rates. Expect the platforms to quote the first number and skip the second.

How does farmland actually make money?

Farmland pays you in two ways, and the split between them is the single most useful thing to understand before choosing a platform. Income arrives as rent from the farmer who works the land. Appreciation arrives only when the land is revalued or sold. In 2025 those two components pulled in opposite directions: the income return was positive at 3.05% while the capital return was negative at -2.80%.

The lease decides how much of the crop risk lands on you. Under a cash rent lease the farmer pays a fixed amount per acre regardless of yield or commodity prices, which makes the income predictable and caps your upside. Under a crop share lease the landowner takes a percentage of the harvest, so income rises in a good year and falls in a bad one. A flex rent lease sits between the two, with a base payment plus a bonus tied to yield or price. Gladstone Land’s move toward crop share is exactly this trade, and it is why analysts describe its earnings as more seasonal than they were.

Crop type then decides the shape of the risk. Row crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat are replanted annually, so a bad season costs one year of income. Permanent crops such as almonds, pistachios and vines take years to reach bearing age and cannot be switched, which raises both the potential return and the water exposure. Specialty crops sit in the permanent camp for practical purposes. This is why a California specialty-crop deal and a Midwest row-crop fund are not the same investment even at the same headline yield.

Lease type	Who carries crop risk	Income pattern	Typical use
Cash rent	The farmer	Fixed per acre, paid regardless of yield	Row crop land, most REIT leases historically
Crop share	Shared with the landowner	Rises and falls with yield and commodity prices	Permanent and specialty crops, and increasingly Gladstone Land
Flex rent	Mostly the farmer	Base payment plus a yield or price bonus	Negotiated row crop leases

Farm management is the third piece, and it is most of what the annual fee buys. Somebody has to select the tenant, negotiate and enforce the lease, budget for irrigation and drainage, handle property taxes and insurance, and decide when to replant. On AcreTrader and FarmTogether that work is done for you and charged for. If you buy land directly you either do it yourself or hire a farm management company, and the cost does not disappear.

Is farmland a good inflation hedge and diversifier?

Farmland has historically been a reasonable inflation hedge and a genuine diversifier, but 2025 is a useful reminder that neither property is a guarantee in any single year. The diversification case is the stronger of the two: farmland returns have shown low correlation with the stock market and with bonds, because rent depends on what the land grows rather than on what equities do. Investors looking to add a real asset alongside major asset classes such as stocks and bonds are buying that low correlation, not a higher expected return.

The inflation argument runs through land values and rent. Cropland appreciation of 3.3% in 2026 and pasture appreciation of 4.2% did roughly track consumer prices, and cash rents reset periodically. But the appreciation you actually receive depends on when your farm is revalued or sold, which on a private platform is a decision you do not control and a date you cannot choose. Over a long-term horizon the asset class has been attractive; over the five to ten years a single deal is likely to run, the outcome depends heavily on entry price and exit timing.

The demand case is the one to treat carefully. A growing global population needs more food from a fixed supply of arable acres, and that argument appears on every platform’s homepage. It is directionally sound and says nothing about whether a specific offering at a specific price is a good investment. Global demand for food does not stop a particular orchard from losing its water allocation. Judge the deal, not the thesis.

One more practical point about opportunities you may see advertised. Some platforms present a deal as a chance to buy a piece of farmland; others give you fund units across a portfolio of agricultural investments. Direct investment in one farm concentrates everything, including the tenant. A fund spreads the tenant risk and the geography but removes your ability to choose the property. Neither is better in the abstract. If your goal is diversification rather than a particular farm, the fund structures and the two farmland REITs provide it more cheaply, and the REITs also let you learn how the asset class behaves without locking up capital for a decade.

What do the accredited-only platforms charge, and what do you get?

Fees on these platforms are layered, and the sale fee at the end is usually the largest one. Here is what each manager published as of September 1, 2026.

AcreTrader

AcreTrader sells fractional shares in single-purpose LLCs, each holding one farm. Minimums typically run $10,000 to $25,000 per deal. The platform charges roughly 0.75% a year in servicing, about 2% in closing costs at purchase, and around 5% when the farm is sold. The intended hold is five to ten years and there is no secondary market, so treat the capital as locked.

The ownership changed and most articles have not caught up. Proterra Investment Partners, a Minneapolis alternative asset manager with more than $3.4 billion under management, acquired AcreTrader on August 12, 2025. The AcreTrader team now operates inside Proterra; the land-data business Acres.com was kept separate. Our fuller write-up is in the AcreTrader review.

FarmTogether

FarmTogether managed about $217 million across 51 farmland properties in eight states and 15 crop types as of March 2026. Crowdfunded offerings start at $15,000. Its Sustainable Farmland Fund is also available through the Alto marketplace with a $50,000 minimum inside a Traditional, Roth or SEP IRA, which is the cleanest tax-deferred route on this page. Details are in our FarmTogether review, and we set the two platforms side by side in AcreTrader vs FarmTogether.

Farmland LP

Farmland LP buys conventional farmland and converts it to organic and regenerative production, betting that the conversion itself creates the return. Its third fund closed in March 2026 and has already bought more than $100 million of farmland in California, Oregon and Washington. This is a fund commitment rather than a deal-by-deal platform, and the soil-improvement thesis is the same one we look at in our piece on threats to agricultural sustainability.

FarmFundr

FarmFundr, founded in 2014 and run by a working farmer, offers accredited investors equity in specialty-crop farmland concentrated in California’s Central Valley. Deal flow is thin by design and the geographic concentration is real: California water policy is a single point of failure for this portfolio in a way it is not for a Midwest row-crop fund.

LandFund Partners

LandFund Partners has run seven funds in the Mid-South since 2013 and manages more than 40,000 acres. Its Soil Enrichment Fund reports a 16.5% annualised net return since inception on October 1, 2021, a figure the manager publishes and which no third party has audited for us. LandFund is also doing something the rest are not: it is under contract to sell 100 acres of Arkansas farmland to Silicon Ranch for a 4.75 MW solar facility, and estimates about 20% of its roughly 50,000-acre portfolio could suit similar projects. If you want the arithmetic behind that, we ran the numbers on solar farm income per acre.

Can you hold farmland in an IRA?

Yes, through a self-directed IRA, and one platform has made it routine. FarmTogether’s Sustainable Farmland Fund is offered on the Alto marketplace to eligible investors with a $50,000 minimum using a Traditional, Roth or SEP IRA. For everything else on this page, you would need a self-directed IRA custodian willing to hold a private placement, which adds annual custody fees and paperwork. The two listed REITs need none of that: any ordinary IRA can hold FPI or LAND.

What changed since this page last named its picks?

This article had not been revised since November 2023. Six things in it were wrong or out of date, and we have listed each one below instead of editing them out without saying so.

What the page said	What is true	Verified
Groundfloor was ranked the third-best farmland investing platform	Groundfloor does not sell farmland. Its own site describes real estate investing without buying property, and its business is short-term property loans. It has been removed.	Sep 1, 2026
AcreTrader described as an independent platform	Proterra Investment Partners acquired AcreTrader on August 12, 2025. The team now sits inside Proterra.	Sep 1, 2026
LandFund linked to land.tech	Wrong company. LandFund Partners publishes at landfundpartners.com; land.tech is an unrelated land-analytics product.	Sep 1, 2026
Stewardship listed as platform six, linked to stewardshipinv.com	That address returns no readable page. We could not confirm the company is still operating, so we removed the entry rather than send readers to it. Steward, at gosteward.com, is a different company and is listed on its own merits above.	Sep 1, 2026
Farmland presented as a steady appreciating asset	The NCREIF Total Farmland Index returned 0.20% in 2025, with a negative capital return.	Sep 1, 2026
Accreditation mentioned late and in passing	Five of the nine options here are closed to non-accredited investors. That is now the first thing the page says.	Sep 1, 2026

What is the difference between a farmland fund, a farmland REIT and a crowdfunding platform?

They are three different investment vehicles wrapped around the same asset, and searchers use the words interchangeably even though the structures behave very differently. A farmland REIT is a listed company that owns agricultural real estate and distributes rent to shareholders. A farmland fund is a private pooled vehicle with a stated investment strategy, a defined term and a capital commitment. A crowdfunding platform sells you a stake in one identified property, usually through a single-purpose LLC. Farmland investment companies is the umbrella term for all three, and the difference between them decides your minimum investment, your liquidity and how much of the outcome you control.

	Farmland REIT	Farmland fund	Crowdfunding platform
Examples here	Farmland Partners, Gladstone Land	Farmland LP, LandFund Partners, FarmTogether Sustainable Farmland Fund	AcreTrader, FarmTogether crowdfunded deals, FarmFundr, Harvest Returns
Minimum investment	One share	Six figures in most cases, $50,000 through Alto	$5,000 to $25,000 per deal
What you get	A slice of hundreds of farms and thousands of acres of farmland	Units in a managed portfolio of agricultural investments	A stake in one identified piece of farmland
Who picks the property	The REIT’s management	The fund manager	You do, from what is listed
Reporting	SEC filings, audited	Manager reports to investors	Manager reports to investors
Return on investment shows up as	Dividends plus share price	Distributions plus a terminal payout	Rent distributions plus proceeds when the farm sells

Agricultural real estate investment trusts are the only one of the three that gives ordinary investors access to farmland with daily pricing and an audited financial record, which is why they belong on a page like this even though the platforms rarely mention them. The trade-off is that a REIT share also carries equity-market behaviour: it can fall on a day when no farm changed hands. Private funds and crowdfunding deals avoid that mark-to-market noise, and pay for it with a decade of illiquidity.

How should you compare farmland investing platforms before committing?

Six questions separate a serious offering from a marketing page, and every one of them has an answer in the offering documents rather than on the homepage.

1. What is the total fee load, including the exit fee, and what does it cost you on a flat outcome rather than a good one?
2. Who is the tenant, what does the lease say, and when does the rent reset?
3. What are the water rights, and in a permanent-crop deal, what happens in a drought allocation year?
4. What are the manager’s investment objectives and the stated hold, and what happens if the property does not sell on schedule?
5. Has anyone independent verified the reported return on investment, or is the track record self-published?
6. What price were comparable agricultural land parcels in that county fetching, measured against USDA farmland values for the state rather than a national average?

If the platform will not answer the first three in writing, that is the answer. And if you are weighing a farmland investment opportunity against the rest of your investment portfolio, size it as an illiquid alternative allocation, not as a bond substitute, however steady the advertised rent looks.

What are the real risks?

Illiquidity is the risk that surprises people, not crop failure. On a single-farm deal there is no buyer for your shares before the farm sells, and that can be a decade away. Plan around the lock-up first and the agronomy second.

• There is no exit before the farm sells. AcreTrader states plainly that no secondary marketplace exists for individual farm deals, so assume the money is committed for the full hold.
• The fees are charged whether or not the farm appreciates: roughly 2% at purchase, 0.75% a year while you hold, and around 5% when it sells.
• A crowdfunded deal is one farm, one water source and one tenant. The REITs spread that risk across hundreds of properties.
• Track records on private platforms are self-published and rarely audited by an independent party.
• The asset class can go sideways, as 2025 showed. A 0.20% index year against 3%-plus growth in appraised land values is a gap you should be able to explain before investing.
• Permanent crops in California carry water-rights and policy risk that a Midwest row-crop farm does not.

Who should use these platforms, and who should not?

Use a private farmland platform if you are accredited, can lock up capital for five to ten years without needing it, and want exposure to a specific farm or region rather than a diversified index. Use the REITs if you want farmland exposure you can sell, price and hold in an ordinary IRA. Use Steward or Harvest Returns if you want to fund working farms at a small ticket and understand you are lending, not buying land.

Skip all of it if farmland is meant to be your emergency fund, if a 5% to 10% allocation would already strain your budget, or if the appeal is mainly that Bill Gates does it. Gates holds roughly 275,000 acres through Cascade Investment, which makes him the largest private farmland owner in the country and tells you nothing useful about a $15,000 fractional stake. If your interest is really in where money and outcomes meet, our overview of what impact investing is and our list of impact investing examples are better starting points than a farm deal.

How we researched this page

Every platform on this page was checked against its own live website on September 1, 2026, and any entry we could not confirm was removed rather than left in place. Share prices and declared distributions for FPI and LAND come from market data for the August 31, 2026 close. Land values come from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service 2026 Land Values Summary. Index returns come from NCREIF’s fourth-quarter 2025 results as summarised by AgIS Capital on March 6, 2026. The accredited investor thresholds come from the SEC’s investor bulletin. Where a manager’s own published figures disagreed with each other, we said so instead of picking one.

Disclosure and disclaimer. This page carries no affiliate links. Three links in the previous version pointed at internal redirects that led back to our own pages or to a dead address, and they have been removed rather than replaced. Nothing here is financial advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or a solicitation. Farmland investments can lose value, private placements are illiquid, and past returns do not predict future ones. Talk to a licensed adviser about your own situation.

Frequently asked questions about farmland investing platforms

Sources

• USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Land Values 2026 Summary, and Farm Policy News on cropland passing $6,000 per acre.
• AgIS Capital, State of Returns, March 2026, summarising NCREIF’s fourth-quarter 2025 Farmland Return Index.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission, Accredited Investors, Updated Investor Bulletin.
• Proterra Investment Partners, announcement of the AcreTrader acquisition, August 12, 2025.
• The Gladstone Companies, declared distribution schedule.
• LandFund Partners, Steward and Harvest Returns company sites, checked September 1, 2026.
• Farmland Partners dividend declaration of July 28, 2026, and closing prices for FPI and LAND on August 31, 2026, from market data.

Last updated September 1, 2026. This revision removed Groundfloor, which is not a farmland platform; removed an entry we could not verify; corrected AcreTrader’s ownership and LandFund’s website; added the two listed farmland REITs with current prices and distributions; added the 2025 NCREIF result and the 2026 USDA land values; and put the accreditation requirement at the top of the page. Related reading: farmland REITs, investing in vertical farming and real estate investment websites.