Vertical farming company Plenty has entered into a strategic alliance with REIT Realty Income to fund Plenty’s vertical farm development. Under the agreement, Realty Income will acquire and provide development funding for properties that will house Plenty’s indoor farms, which will be leased to Plenty under long-term net leases. The agreement provides for up to $1 billion of development opportunities.
As the initial transaction of the alliance, Realty Income will acquire the land and provide development funding for the first farm of Plenty’s indoor vertical farm campus near Richmond, Virginia, which was announced last year. Plenty expects the future multi-farm campus to deliver more than 20 million pounds of produce across multiple crops annually. The first farm to be developed on the campus will grow strawberries with Plenty partner Driscoll’s and initially serve the Northeast market.
If this sale and leaseback type of transaction sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because you read yesterday about a similar kind of deal being used to fund sidewalk delivery robot startup Kiwibot. However, unlike the food robotics market, sale & leaseback transactions are pretty common with real estate assets. Farmers have been using these types of arrangements for decades, so it’s not all that surprising to see REITS start to take an interest in more tech-forward farming players like Plenty.
It’s also not surprising for a capital-hungry vertical farming business like Plenty to look to this type of financing to fund its growth. AppHarvest and Kalera entered into sale and leaseback deals last year after running into financial troubles and largely exhausting access to more traditional growth capital in the venture market. Plenty has already raised a massive $914 million in funding as of last year and had started to run into financial difficulties early this year, announcing they would close their San Francisco facility.
Now, with its new funding facility through Reality, the company has access to a large – but fundamentally more risky – pool of growth capital.
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