There's a block on the seller's tree inventory that is really a countdown

Spent a week with an offering package on a permanent-crop deal, roughly 300 planted acres of nuts in a hot inland valley, and the thing that reordered my whole view of it was one page in the back. Not the rent roll equivalent, not the water report. A block map with planting years.

Four blocks. Two planted in the 2010s, one in 2007, one in 2001. The 2001 block was still producing and still on the yield history at close to full weight, and the broker's pro forma carried it flat for ten years. That block is at the far end of its productive life. Replanting it means taking it out, and then you're carrying dirt with no revenue on it for years while new trees come up, plus the cost of the removal and the new planting itself.

So the deal has a capital event sitting in it that nobody wrote a line for. Whether it lands in year three or year eight changes the answer completely.

What I asked for and got, eventually, was the per-block yield history going back further than the summary sheet showed. The 2001 block wasn't flat. It had been drifting down for six years, slow enough that the whole-farm number covered it because the younger blocks were coming up at the same time.

I didn't do the deal. Not because the math failed, the math might have worked with a real replant reserve in it. I couldn't get comfortable that the operator and I had the same picture of when that block comes out, and on something with a fifteen year horizon that gap matters more than the price.