Financing for Produce Growers

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Interest rates are certainly higher than they were a couple of years ago, and financing hasn’t gotten any easier to come by. ProducePay founder Pablo Borquez says they are one of the few entities that can underwrite perishable biomass risk, giving produce farmers the ability to grow their business.

Borquez... "When you're a fruit and vegetable farmer, traditional financiers, they'll give you cash in exchange of using your land of collateral, in exchange of using machinery as collateral or equipment. But none of them, or very few of them, will actually give you or allow you to leverage what is likely your single biggest asset, which is a future crop, right? So, ProducePay actually goes into your farm and we say, yep, I can reasonably assess that these vines, these trees will produce X amount of dollars and I believe so much because I can see the tree or I can see the vine and the inherent value in it that I will allow you to leverage that future crop by X percent and because there's a huge amount of collateral, call it latent collateral, we allow the farmers to expand the capabilities significantly so that like farmers that work with us will immediately be able to boost their production or at least their cash ability to manage a larger production by a double-digit percentage because they now have a much bigger pocket that allows them to invest in those crops."

Founded in 2014, ProducePay is now active in over 20 countries.