Wall Streeters Quitting Jobs to Become Farmers, Making a Killing Despite Recession

Being Like Soros in Buying Farm Land Lets Investors Reap 16% Annual Gains
By Seth Lubove
Bloomberg
Aug. 10, 2011

Perry Vieth baled hay on a neighbor's farm in Wisconsin for two summers during high school in 1972 and 1973. The grueling labor left him with no doubt about getting a college degree so that he'd never have to work as hard again for a paycheck. Thirty-eight years later, and after a career as a securities lawyer and fixed-income trader, Vieth is back on the farm.

Except, now, he owns it. As co-founder of Ceres Partners LLC, a Granger, Indiana-based investment firm, Vieth oversees 61 farms valued at $63.3 million in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Tennessee. He's so enthusiastic about the investments that he quit a job in 2008 overseeing $7 billion in fixed-income assets at PanAgora Asset Management Inc., a Boston-based quantitative money management firm, to focus full time on farming, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.

On a spring afternoon, Vieth, 54, barrels along backcountry roads in a Jeep Cherokee in Indiana and Michigan to scout a fruit orchard and corn and soybean farms to buy. Rural towns with names such as Three Rivers pass by in a blur, separated by a wide horizon of fields with young crops popping up.

"When I told people I was leaving to start an investment fund in farmland, they said, 'You're doing what?'" says Vieth, in a red polo golf shirt and khakis. "It will always be difficult for Wall Street firms to understand. It's not like buying stocks on a computer."

It's much better: Returns from farmland have trounced those of equities. Ceres Partners produced an average annual gain of 16.4 percent after fees from January 2008, just after the firm started, through June of this year, Vieth says.

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