I appreciate the risk adjusted returns are poor. My question then is why farms as assets are so valuable. Seems like a disconnect somewhere.
There are tons of tax benefits for owning land and for many of them you don't even need to produce anything or even have a working farm. You just need to own eligible land. Combine this with the fact that farmers are often capital poor so a lot of farmland is leased from those that own it. We basically have the same issue that renters are facing in modern urban America but with farmers.
Getting the financial industry out of assets we can't make more of seems like the obvious choice.
https://farmfolio.net/articles/why-is-bill-gates-investing-i...
https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2022-06-08-why-...