Greetings and welcome to Gladstone Land Fourth Quarter and Year End Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now pleasure to introduce your host, David Gladstone, Chief Executive Officer and President. Thank you, you may begin.

All right. Thank you, Jessie. This is a nice introduction. This is David Gladstone and welcome to the quarterly and annual conference call for Gladstone Land, and thank you all for calling in today. We appreciate you taking time to listen to our presentation. We’re going to start out Michael LiCalsi, he is our General Counsel and Secretary and he is also President of Gladstone Administration which is the administrator for all of the Gladstone funds. Michael you want go?

Sure. Thanks David and good morning everybody. Today's report may include forward-looking statements under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including those regarding our future performance. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties that are based upon our current plans, which we believe to be reasonable. Many factors may cause our actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including all risk factors in our Form 10-K and other documents we file with the SEC. and you can find those on our website, which is www.gladstoneland.com, specifically go to the Investors page or on the SEC's website, that’s www.sec.gov. Now, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any of these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Today, we will discuss FFO, that’s funds from operations. Now, FFO is a non-GAAP accounting term defined as net income excluding the gains or losses from the sale of real estate and any impairment losses from property, plus depreciation and amortization of real estate assets. Now, we will also discuss core FFO, which we generally define as FFO adjusted for certain non-recurring revenues and expenses, also adjusted FFO, which further address core FFO for certain non-cash items, such as converting GAAP rents to normalized cash rents. And we believe these are better indications of our operating results and allow you better compare our performance period-over-period. Now, we ask that you take the opportunity to visit our website, once again its www. gladstoneland.com, sign up for our e-mail notification service so you can stay up-to-date on what's going on at the company. You can also find us on Facebook, keyword there is The Gladstone Companies and our Twitter handle is @GladstoneComps. Today's call is an overview of our results, so we ask that you review our press release and Form 10-Q, both issued yesterday, for more detailed information. You can fund them on the Investors page of our website. Now, with that I will turn it back to David.

Okay. Thanks Michael. I'll start with a brief summary of our current farmland holdings, we currently own approximately 113,000 acres on 164 farms and about 45,000 acre feet of banked water valued all of this together at about $1.5 billion for the land and the water. Our farm is located at 15 different states and more importantly, it's in 29 different growing regions. These growing regions determine just about everything about the farm and its ability to grow. Our farms continue to be 100% occupied and are leased to 85 different tenant farmers, all of whom are unrelated to us and the tenants on these farms are growing over 60 different crops. Given the number of different growing regions, tenants, farms, types of crops. I think there's sufficient diversification to provide safety and security for the cash flows coming in from the rent. We believe this diversification helps protect dividends that we pay to our shareholders. We had another active quarter, where the year ending 2021, for the year we had 294 million of new acquisitions. About half of these are 147 million came during the fourth quarter. And while this is a good year from an earnings perspective, we didn't get to see as much of an impact from the acquisitions in 2021. So we're looking forward to reporting what we hope are even stronger results and 2022. We had a good year in terms of participation rents. In fact, it was a fantastic year. We recorded about $3.4 million in additional income during the fourth quarter. This resulted in us recording total participation rents of about $5.2 million for the year, which is more than twice the amount recorded in each of the prior two years. This increase was larger the results participation rents, and their components on…

Alright, thank you, David and good morning, everyone. Again, briefly with our balance sheet. During the fourth quarter, our total assets increased by about $90 million due to new acquisitions. These were financed with a mix of debt and equity proceeds. From a financing perspective, since the beginning of the fourth quarter, we secured about $31 million of new long term borrowings at a weighted average rate of 3.4%, which is fixed for the next nine plus years. On the equity side, since the beginning of the fourth quarter, we've raised about $49 million of net proceeds through sales of our common stock under the ATM program, and about $35 million in net proceeds from sales of our Series C preferred stock. Moving on to our operating results. First, I’ll note, net income for the quarter was about $2 million and net loss to common shareholders of $1.4 million or $0.042 per common share. For the year, we had net income of about $3.5 million and a net loss to common shareholders of $8.7 million or $0.286 per common share. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, adjusted FFO for the fourth quarter was approximately $6.7 million compared to $5.3 million in the third quarter, an increase of about 28%. And AFFO per share was $0.199 in the fourth quarter versus $0.166 in the third quarter, an increase of 19%. Dividends declared per share were about $0.136 in the fourth quarter versus $0.135 in the third quarter. Annual basis adjusted FFO for 2021 was approximately $20.4 million compared to $14.3 million in 2020, an increase of 42%, and AFFO per share with $0.668 in 2021 versus $0.641 in 2020, an increase of 4%. The year-over-year increase in the per share figures were a bit muted due to an early lease termination fee received…

Okay. Thank you, Lewis. Nice report. Acquisition activity remains good for us, and we continue to see buying opportunities coming our way. And just a few final points I'd like to make before we get some questions. We believe that investing in farmland, growing crops that contribute to healthy lifestyles such as fruits and vegetables and nuts, follows the trend that we're seeing in the marketplace today. Overall demand for prime farmland growing berries and vegetables remains stable to strong among all of the areas where the farms are located, particularly along the West Coast, including most of California, Oregon and Washington and the East Coast, especially in Florida and some other States. And overall, farmland continues to perform well compared to other assets. The NCREIF Index I mentioned this often because NCREIF is the Farmland Index, which currently makes up about 13.8 billion worth of agricultural properties in the United States and has an average annual return of about 12.6% over the past 20 years, with no negative years during that period. This is equal to that of the overall REIT Index and higher than the S&P Index, both of which had 4 negative years over that time period. In closing, please remember that purchasing stock in this company is a long term investment. It's a slow moving piece of machinery that makes money day in and day out. I think an investment in our stock really has two points. First of all, it's similar to gold and that it's hard assets. I mean, this is dirt. It's been there for centuries, maybe even longer, as an intrinsic value because there's a limited amount of good farmland and it's being used up by urban developments, especially in California and Florida. We have many farms in those areas, and one point in time somebody will show up and buy one of our farms so they can build houses on it. And second, unlike gold and other alternative assets, it's an active investment asset, has cash flows to investors, and we believe that's better than a bond fund because we keep increasing the dividend. We expect inflation, particularly in the food sector, to increase and we expect the values of underlying farmland to increase as a result. We expect this is especially true for the fresh produce food sector and the trends of more people in the US eating healthy foods continues to grow. Now we'll have some questions from those who follow us. Operator if you'll come on and tell them how they can ask some questions.

Good morning guys.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Yeah. So you guys really deployed an impressive amount of capital in the fourth quarter. Do you think you could speak to the state of the current pipeline and maybe give us some information on how much capital you think you may be able to put to work next year? It seems year-over-year you're continuously deploying more and more capital. Do you think that trend will continue?

We're hoping so. We've, as you know, in 2019 and 2020, we had about $250 million of acquisitions in each year, close to $300 million, $294 million this year. Each of the years do tend to start off slowly. I know we had more than $100 million, I think close to $200 million of acquisitions in the fourth quarter last year, close to $150 million this year. So it takes us time in the beginning of the following year to replenish the pipeline that we've depleted in the fourth quarter and we're seeing that right now. We do have deals that we're looking at. They're in various stages. Hard to see what we'll do for the year right now. But I mean, internally, we do pencil in a target between $200 million to $300 million and understanding that's a pretty wide range that depends alone, but it kind of just all depends on the opportunities that we see, and which ones fit our investment criteria. Right now we have between two and five deals that are beyond the initial review stage that we're looking at. Not sure if we'll get anything close in Q1, but hopefully by early Q2, we'll have something to announce.

Okay, great. And what sources of capital do you plan on drawing to fund these new deals?

Right now with the availability on our line of credit, the MetLife facility, and certain other loans that we've closed but have not drawn on yet since we don't have an immediate need for the cash. We have $115 million of dry powder that we could deploy today. That's not even leveraged, so divided by -- with a 6% LTV that gets us close to $300 million worth of acquisitions. We also have $35 million of unpledged properties. So that would be the first source, but anything beyond that we do other Series C sales that are continuing to come in strong. We have availability under our common ATM that we've made very good use of. During 2021, I think we sold a little under $170 million worth. That price remains very attractive for us. And, of course, additional borrowings when we do need those as well. So, we have plenty of sources of funding right now.

Awesome, awesome. And could you remind me of the interest rate on the line of credit?

It's -- it has floor of 2.5% and that's where it's at right now. It's LIBOR plus, spread it to 2%.

Okay, got you. And I'm curious to know what was impacting the operations of the farmer in the Midwest whose operating expenses, you guys have chosen to cover in exchange for participation rents? What, sort of, problem was that farmer seeing?

So we had one farmer that was leasing two farms from us. And this farmer was getting into bankruptcy, so we were releasing him from the lease and bringing on a new tenant. One of the farms, the new tenant we were bringing on he was very familiar with and he was competent enough to sign a long-term lease with us. The other one was relatively new to him. So rather, he wasn't comfortable signing a long-term lease on that farm. So what we did was we just did a one year lease, where we'll pay – will front end the majority of the operating costs a fixed amount, and in return, we will get a large majority 80% of gross proceeds on the farm at the end of the year. As you know, commodity prices are very strong right now. We're confident in the farmers ability and the yields that are possible on this farm. So we think we're – we think we're going to come out ahead, but of course, no guarantee of that. But at the end of this, this first lease year, hopefully, this tenant will become more comfortable with the farm and we'll be able to sign up a long-term lease with him at the end of the year.

Great. And just to confirm the increase in operating expenses, I believe you guys said 560,000. Is that right?

That was the one – that was a fixed commitment that we gave to this new tenant. Yes.

Got it. Got it. Finally, could you give us an update on the SPAC, regarding any potential developments there and also, congratulations on the new IPO for the asset management firm. I would love to kind of hear some of their objectives as well?

Hard to talk about other funds during this conversation, but quite frankly, we've got some opportunities and we're going to try to get those done soon, so that the SPAC can get funded. No guarantees, it's always hard to get those things done, and much harder than we ever thought it was going to be getting in that business. So right now the SPAC cruising along and we're hopeful that we'll have something to announce in the next I don’t know 60 days. As far as the rest of the companies, they're all doing extremely well. Each of our four public companies, they are doing extremely well, including this one, of course.

Okay, great. I don't want to hold the line. So I'll turn it over to other analysts. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question is coming from Craig Kucera with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good morning, guys. I wanted to talk first about variable rents. Clearly, a pretty major increase year-over-year. And this may be a tough question to answer, but if you were to take a guess, how much would you attribute to food inflation versus maybe rolling out an increasing number of leases with a variable rent component?

You’re right. That is a difficult question to answer. We can see – we can definitely say that a certain crops gave us a better return than others. Pistachio pricing, for example, that was very high for us. The yields were good on those farms. Almond pricing for conventional pricing was down a little bit this year. So that was slightly offset but the majority of our revenues for 2021 were coming from the pistachio crop. Not – I know that doesn't exactly I’ve answered your question but I think that might be the best we can do right now.

No, that's helpful. I appreciate the color there. And circling to kind of water issues that you headed a few farms, whether that's in Colorado or in California, which are expecting to be a little more sustainable, is that influencing how you're thinking about underwriting and are those types of considerations increasingly coming into the market in regards to pricing?

I think everybody who buys a farm is looking at the water very carefully. California goes through good times and bad and it's sort of in the middle right now, and it may get worse and it may get better. We seem to be in a good position to handle either one of those. And they thought the snowpack in the mountains was going to be much bigger than it is today, but it didn't quite live up to that. We're supposed to get some more rain out that way. But if you're in the business that we're in, you're constantly looking at the weather to determine whether the water is coming in from the ocean side as the -- all of the things that are going on out there and coming across the part of the business that is unbelievably difficult to predict is the weather. And I now have much more affinity for the people who are trying to forecast weather because we have no way of really knowing what's going to happen, although over the years I've been at it now about 20 years, and we seem to come out okay every year. And so I'm hopeful that we do the same thing this time. Our guys who run stuff in California and especially in Oxnard as well as Watsonville are all looking at the weather machine that's out in the ocean and trying to guess which way it's going to go and how much water is coming in. So it's a risk. But generally speaking, the people out there get by, and almost all of the farms have wells that have enough water to do the job of growing our crops. Doesn't mean that they'll always have it, but they do today. So I'm grateful that we can continue to do what we're doing. We don't have that kind of problem in Florida and so we like Florida for that reason, is that the water tables are high and it's easy for us to figure out what kind of water we're going to get in Florida. So we'll just keep pedaling along and trying to get the right farm. And the good news is that you have a history on virtually every farm. I mean, I track some of those farms when I was buying early back into the 1930s, and they were growing turnips at the time, and it's changed every year since then in terms of what you plan and what you decide to do with that farm.

Got it. Lew changing directions. You typically book the vast majority of your interest patronage in the first quarter. Can you give us a sense of how you're thinking about that here in 2022?

So internally, we usually pencil in a similar amount as the prior year. We do believe that to be conservative because every year we do have additional loans from farm credit. So if the payout ratio or percentage stays the same then we should have more. But as you know, these amounts are never guarantee that theoretically could be zero for any given association. We think that's a remote possibility. But it's it we don't really know it until they announce it. We've only been told by one association so far about the payout and it came in as expected. But we have 13 different associations we borrow from, so there's still a lot more information to come. I will say I think last year in total, we recorded I think it was $2.5 million of patronage, $300,000 of that did was a prepayment of interest patronage is due to kind of the farmer -- growers difficulty with COVID. So, I would -- all else being equal, it may not come in quite as high as last year. I think about $2.2 million was a regular payout, $300,000 was additional. So, we're expecting somewhere in that range. But it -- again, we won't know until another month or two out.

Got it. And just one more from me. I feel like a year or two ago, you were raising rents pretty aggressively, the farm economy was really going quite well. And this is the first quarter obviously for more of an anomaly, you had a pretty decent rent roll down subsequent to the year end, but I guess I'd be curious as to -- as you think about the other leases expiring this year, just the ability of farmers to kind of push through maybe some of their higher operating costs such as fertilizer or some of the other components of the business?

Keep in mind that the roll down from the 2022 renewal so far is really just that one anomaly that one lease where we fronted the expenses. If you take out that one lease or other leases renewed in 2022, have increased by about 5%. Not -- maybe not as high as the 8% to 10% that we had in the prior years, but it's only been a couple of farms that we've renewed so far this year. And on the farm that we did take the roll down from, we are expecting to recoup all of that or at least a majority of it, if not all in and then some, at the end of the year when the crop share numbers do come in. So, we think at the end of the day, we'll be okay with that farm. But the roll down is -- I just want to point out that the roll down is really a function of that that one change in lease structure. We only have one lease coming due over the next six months. We do expect that lease to be pretty flat from where it is right now. We have a few more leases coming expiring in the latter half of the year. We began negotiations, but it's too early to give an estimate on that, but we don't currently foresee any significant roll downs in any of those.

Okay. Thanks. I appreciate it guys.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from a line of James Villard with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning guys.

Good morning.

Can you give us some more color on I guess what you're seeing for capital rate outlook as you, kind of, get started in 2022?

I don’t think there's any big change coming in cap rates. There's some things going on in the marketplace today, of course, that may change everything, but all of the inflation that's going on, but it hasn't hurt us in the past. I don't expect it to hurt us now. But cap rates should remain in the 5% to 5.5% for good solid properties and that's where we play.

Got it. Yes, just one more thing. I guess as you kind of highlighted what the weather issues that you mentioned, this have any impact I guess on participating ramps, and is it something that just happens every year that you just kind bake in, or is it more of a one-time thing?

It's one of those variables based on weather and it's really hard to forecast the weather. And as a result, I don't think there's going to be much of a change in terms of the way that we do business. I'd love to find a way to cover it. If you could find some insurance for weather it’d be nice. Somebody is insuring the weather. So we're at the mercy of the weather, weather gods and don't know where we're going to get what, but it just seems to work out every year.

Thanks for the answers. I appreciate that. That's all for me.

Okay, next question.

[Operator Instructions] It appears, we have no additional questions at this time. So I'd like to pass the floor back to management for closing remarks.

Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate everybody calling in and we'll see you next quarter. That's the end of this call.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. Once again, we thank you for your participation and you may disconnect at this time.