Horticulture. It's an exciting sector but not always accessible for many investors, particularly if they want an organic focus or to put their capital in specific farms. Farmfolio hopes to change that, using the principles of crowdsourcing to develop organic produce projects in Central and South America. At www.freshfruitportal.com, we catch up with founder and CEO Dax Cooke to find out more.

"With the lack of organic development in Central and South America, it’s a huge opportunity," says Cooke, who has spent the last 12 years in financial services and capital raising.

Cooke says he took advantage of his knowledge of financial structuring to create something unique, giving the average person the opportunity to participate in large-scale agricultural investments like farms or processing facilities.

"We really got the idea for Farmfolio from the crowdfunding movement that’s been going on," he says.

"If you look at investing in agriculture today it’s very limited. You've got to access through ETFs (exchange traded funds) but there’s not much related to actual production; it's more supply, fertilizer inputs, things like that. You're not actually participating in the development of agriculture.

"So we’ve created a new concept called farm shares which are Delaware LLCs that we established and raise capital through that to purchase land and company assets that are in agricultural development in Central and South America."

In essence, an investor can buy a share in a U.S. company that has land in Panama or Colombia for example, and shares can be traded in a private market exchange so they are "not subject to the market manipulation that you would get trading stocks".

"Right now we’re just scaling up, we just launched this year. The idea is that we’ll have several projects probably within the next two years.

"I'm hoping we can get five to 10 projects online, and then in 5-10 years I’m hoping we can get 50-100 projects online so that not only can you diversify yourself by product but by country or by different risk factors."

The first project, Colombia-based Ganaderia Pietrasanta, currently has four revenue streams - a 12-year-old teak plantation, a cattle operation, passion fruit production and coconut development.

"Coconut development is going to be the largest piece, however it’s a new development and will start from scratch as organic.

"Right now we’re starting with conversion purchases, so most of the projects we’re targeting right now are conventional producers and we’re converting them to organics, which is a three-year process.

"We wanted to start with projects that were already existing so we had infrastructure in place so it wasn’t a complete greenfield project, and we could get growing faster and use some of the other existing revenue streams to return dividends to investors."

While some projects have other agricultural components, Cooke emphasizes the majority of what Farmfolio is looking for is produce-based.

"We’re probably not going to be into moving it up the supply chain for a couple of years as we come online - we are looking at some citrus operations in Peru, avocado operations in Mexico, we’re looking potentially at another coconut project in Panama, we’ve got a mango project we’re looking at," he says.

The group is firmly assessing seven projects of which three are now in the process of due diligence.

"We'll probably make a decision sometime in the next three to four months of what our second project will be, and probably the third and fourth will be early next year.

"We’ve had a huge response so far in terms of site visits and we are starting our road shows coming up in the next three months.

"In the next two weeks we’re launching our app, we’re calling it the Ag Investor app, so people will be able to load it to the iPhone or Android device, get notifications when projects come along, and if you’re an investor you’ll be able to see farm activity."

Evaluations will be made semi-annually so people can keep track of their shares just like they would with a brokerage account online.

To get the first project sold out the minimum investment was US$25,000 per share, but as Farmfolio develops the minimum investment will be much lower.

"What we have planned on all along is on the second offering we’re going to lower the minimums to US$2,500 and once we’re sold out of what we call our A-round of our first project, we’re going to do a share split 10-for-one.

"We’re really trying to build this as a liquid platform where people are able to trade these shares, and certainly have an exit other than just a return on capital from dividends.

"We use a very standard valuation for projects, and we’re updating the cash flows on a regular basis to adjust what the actual underlying value of that share is, so that the market value people are going to bid on is based on a real value."

www.freshfruitportal.com