CASE STUDY >>
Oregon Snake River Farm
A Story about Due Diligence and Determination
Challenge
Since its development in the mid-sixties, a high-profile farm along the Snake River in Oregon developed a reputation for being a challenging operation. Overgrown with weeds and riddled with a leaky and antiquated irrigation, the defunct farm with over 10,000 acres needed some visionary oversight and capital to refine its diamond in the rough status.
Solution
Water:
The first order of business was attending to the water rights and irrigation system. Scythe & Spade worked with the Oregon Department of Water Resources to secure and restructure the water rights, such that the allocation and distribution supply mirrored the productive acres.
Renovating the irrigation system involved investigation, surveying, mapping and testing the old pipelines that were established by the previous owners. After our background work was completed, our client installed functional and modern irrigation systems which became an integral part of making the Farm highly efficient and profitable.
Title & Legal:
Originally there were over one hundred and ten exceptions to the fee title. To sort through these issues, we used our proprietary FarmBase™ software to backtrack through time and identify every exception, numerous water rights allocations, security, and their place of use. The findings from the analysis indicated that over the years, some rights had been traded and sold or converted and used to replace the rights previously sold. We worked on revising eight separate and historical title reports to remove exceptions and clear title. The ending result is that the current title and supporting surveys are now greatly simplified as reflected in the title documents with many exceptions removed.
Crop Strategy:
One of the significant, and ultimately most advantageous decisions made by our client was to change the crop strategy.
Instead of planting the high value, specialty type crops that the past owners were very vested in, they made the decision to grow traditional and more predictable commodity crops. In addition, they implemented a no till program and cover crops. The result from this improved crop strategy are yields consistently 10-15% over the county average.
Roadmap to Success
Takeaways
After six years of due diligence and determination and implementing the vision of our client by reformatting water rights, improving irrigation systems and incorporating some vertical integration, the Farm has become one of the most efficient and productive farms in the Pacific Northwest.
Finally, with an intimate knowledge of the property’s features and benefits as well as disclosing its evolution, Scythe & Spade was successful in finding new buyers for the farm at a substantial profit to our client.
