How agricultural crowdfunding works in Spain, and what investors risk on long-lived crops

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A pistachio plantation takes seven to ten years to produce a commercial harvest, and a traditionally planted olive grove five to seven. Banks, which like collateral and shorter repayment terms, are not built to wait that long. Surveys by fi-compass, presented by the European Commission, put the farm financing banks left unmet in Europe at €62 billion in 2022, almost double 2017, with loans of over seven years making up 58% of the gap.

On Fellow Funders, a crowdfunding platform authorised by the CNMV under registration number 2, each plantation is set up as its own company and investors buy shares in it. Returns, if any, come from dividends once the trees produce and from eventually selling the shares. Selling early is the awkward part. Its latest deal, Alboris Sextus, a €750,000 round for 21.45 hectares of irrigated organic pistachio in Socuéllamos, offers five annual windows from 2031 to 2035 in which the promoter commits to buy back up to 10% of shares a year, up to 50% in total. That is a contractual promise rather than a guarantee, and it is worth exactly as much as the promoter's solvency.

The platform says it has financed €7 million of farm projects in 8 rounds since 2018. Alboris La Mancha has raised close to €3 million from 199 private investors over six rounds and planted more than 40 hectares in Ciudad Real. EU rules require disclosures, a knowledge test and a four-day cooling-off period, but not against losing everything. "Eight years are enough to separate experiment from infrastructure," said chief executive Gonzalo Albero.