On a 320 acre almond block with allocation cut to 40 percent, do you underwrite the trees or the well?
Take an offering for a mature almond block, roughly 320 planted acres, trees around year 11 of a stated 22 to 25 year productive life. The seller pro forma runs on full surface allocation. Actual district allocation has been well under that, around 40 percent, and the property has two ag wells with declining static levels. The part that is hard to get comfortable with: the seller prices this as a permanent crop asset with a going concern yield, but if the deficit has to be pumped, water cost per acre foot roughly triples and the operating margin goes negative in a low price year for kernels. And in the states with groundwater allocation regimes coming into force, pumping is not an unlimited backstop anyway, which varies a lot by basin and by state. So does anyone here underwrite these as two separate assets, a declining biological asset with a hard terminal date plus a water right with its own value curve? Discount the tree cash flows to zero at year 23 and value the dirt on a re-plant basis, and the number that falls out is roughly 35 percent below ask. Is that modeling wrong, or is the ask simply optimistic? Also worth hearing how people handle the re-plant capital, since a block is out of production for four or five years after the old trees are pushed.