Farmland Partners Inc. (FPI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Farmland Partners Inc. Q3 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Luca Fabbri, President and Chief Executive Officer. Luca, please go ahead.

Thank you, Erica. Good morning, and welcome to Farmland Partners Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. We truly appreciate you taking the time to join us for these calls because we see them as a very important opportunity to share with you our thinking and our strategy in a format less formal and more interactive than public filings and press releases. I will now turn over the call to our General Counsel, Christine Garrison, for some customary preliminary remarks. Christine?

Thank you, Luca, and thank you to everyone on the call. The press release announcing our third quarter earnings was distributed after market closed yesterday. The supplemental package has been posted to the Investor Relations section of our website under the subheader Events and Presentations. For those who listen to the recording of this presentation, we remind you that the remarks made herein are as of today, October 29, 2026, and will not be updated subsequent to this call. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to the future performance of our portfolio, our identified and potential acquisitions and dispositions, impact of acquisitions, dispositions and financing activities, business development opportunities as well as comments on our outlook for our business, rents and the broader agricultural markets. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including net operating income, FFO, adjusted FFO, EBITDAre and adjusted EBITDAre. Definitions of these non-GAAP measures as well as reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in the company's press release announcing third quarter 2026 earnings, which is available on our website, farmlandpartners.com, and is furnished as an exhibit to our current report on Form 8-K dated October 28, 2026. Listeners are cautioned that these statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond our control. These risks and uncertainties can cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations, and we advise listeners to review the risk factors discussed in our press release distributed yesterday and in documents we have filed with or furnished to the SEC. I would now like to turn the call to our Executive Chairman, Paul Pittman. Paul?

Thank you, Christine. Hello, everybody. So it was a tough quarter from the standpoint of our earnings due to some reserves and negative surprises we had along the way. The underlying core value of the portfolio, which today is gradually getting ever more concentrated in the Midwest is incredibly strong. Nothing negative going on there. Farm economy is pretty decent, but not perfect by any means. Costs are high. But the core portfolio continues to perform very, very well. We got a surprising and negative result in a piece of litigation in Louisiana, which is a major piece of the reserves we took. And then we also have one loan situation that we continue to be worried about. And so we thought it prudent to take a reserve there, even though we will continue all efforts to collect the full amount. So with that, I will stop and turn it over to Luca, I believe, follows me here.

Yes. Thank you, Paul. Just wanted to kind of strengthen a little bit Paul's comments about the strength of -- the resilience of the farm economy, especially the resilience of the asset class. This is not a great year for farmers because despite pretty good news on both yields and crop prices, the -- everybody is now reading headlines about the devastating impact of the cost items on their P&L, especially diesel prices. And this is especially negative at this time of the year when they are burning through a lot of diesel fuel for harvest. So we are about 1/3 of the way into our lease renewal process for the renewing leases, very focused on the Midwest. And we are seeing that there is a lot of uncertainty regarding profitability among farmers. But it's -- and this is also a lease renewal cycle that is coming off a renewal about 3 years ago on average that was incredibly strong. So, so far, we are seeing relatively flat to slightly up lease renewals, but we are still very early to know exactly how it's going to end up in aggregate when we are done. The other point I would like to make is that we are -- as always, we are incredibly strong believers in the asset class, especially for the core of our portfolio in the Midwest. We see the best farmland acquisition opportunity as being our own stock because we are trading at a significant discount to NAV. And to that effect, in the quarter, we purchased about 1.7 million shares at an average price of $10.32. And this is all the comments I wanted to make, and I will turn the call over to our CFO, Susan Landi, for her overview of the company's financial performance. Susan?

Thank you, Luca. I'm going to cover a few items today, including a summary of the 3 and 9 months ended September 30, 2026, a review of our capital structure and updated guidance for 2026. I'll be referring to the supplemental package, which is available in the Investor Relations section of our website under the subheader Events and Presentations. First, I will share a few financial metrics that appear on Page 2. For the 3 months ended September 30, 2026, net loss was $15.5 million or $0.36 per share available to common stockholders versus a net income of $0.5 million or $0 per share available to common stockholders for the same period in 2025. AFFO was negative $2.1 million or negative $0.05 per weighted average share compared to $2.9 million or $0.07 per weighted average share for the same period in 2025. For the 9 months ended September 30, 2026, net loss was $11.7 million or negative $0.28 per share available to common stockholders versus net income of $10.4 million or $0.18 a share available to common stockholders for the same period in 2025. AFFO was $1.7 million or $0.04 per weighted average share compared to $6.5 million or $0.14 per weighted average share for the same period in 2025. Page 5 shows a more comprehensive look at the main drivers of these changes year-over-year. On the revenue side, we were positively impacted by higher receipts from oil and gas royalties and higher interest income due to a higher average balance on loans under the FPI loan program and financing receivables. These increases were offset by lower rental income due to asset dispositions that occurred in the prior year in addition to some lower crop sales in the current year versus the prior year. Operating expenses were higher on both a quarter-to-date and year-to-date basis over the prior year, and this was primarily due to an increase in the provision for credit loss reserve related to loans under the FPI loan program as well as an increase in the estimated loss contingency related to litigation that Paul had mentioned previously. On Page 12, there are a few capital structure items to point out. We had undrawn capacity on our lines of credit of approximately $107 million at the end of Q3 2026. Page 15 is our updated outlook for 2026. The assumptions are listed at the bottom of the page. Changes from the July guidance primarily relate to 2 nonrecurring charges, the additional credit loss reserve and the increase in the loss contingency related to the litigation. Note that these 2 events account for $0.095 of the $0.10 decrease in AFFO per share. The forecasted range of AFFO $8.9 million to $10.7 million or $0.21 to $0.25 per share. This summarizes where we stand today. We will keep you updated as we progress through the year. This wraps up our comments this morning. Thank you all for participating. Operator, you can now begin the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Craig Kucera with Lucid Capital Markets.

With the impairment charges you had this quarter, were those affiliated with just the assets held for sale? Or was that just a more broad-based valuation adjustment in California?

Luca, do you want to take that one?

Sure. And I'll have Susan chime in for some more details. Fundamentally, we have a few farms that we are either holding for sale or we have earmarked for sale in California. That is, frankly, the -- all the farms that we don't particularly like. So the $12 million impairment charge relates to both the ones held for sale and the one that we intend to sell. Susan, anything you want to add to that?

No.

Okay. I guess with Sabrepoint and reading your SEC filings, it reads like you thought this was the final gating factor as far as the appellate decision that will allow you to pursue those claims. Is that your opinion? And can you give us a sense of what those damages might be you might be seeking?

Yes. Let me take this one and Christine, our General Counsel, will chime in after me if she wants to add something. So yes, the victory that we got at the appellate level in the Texas courts on the Sabrepoint case is incredibly strong. Sabrepoint, in our opinion, will continue to delay -- but that opinion, if you actually read the entire opinion, which is publicly available, was very, very strong. It says, look, it's an appellate court. So it says we're not the trier of fact, but it sure looks like there's a smoking gun here is paraphrasing what that opinion said. And so our claims will be allowed to proceed. We assume Sabrepoint will appeal this to the Supreme Court of Texas, not because they think they can win, not because they think the court will probably even take it, but it's further delay. Our hope is that we will engage in a settlement at some point instead of having to try this. If I was on the Sabrepoint side, I would certainly not want to go all the way through the court process and have a court announce that I basically committed fraud on the market. And remember, these guys are "asset managers," and if they go all the way through this case and get another opinion like the one just written, I don't think they can be in the securities business anymore for the rest of their lives. So I think their pressure on them to settle is going to get strong. But who knows. As far as the amount that we could recover, what we ought to recover is $100 million plus. Will we recover that? Probably not. I just don't think Sabrepoint has as much money as the damage they cost, but we're going to go get every penny we can from them. So I'll just leave it at that.