Who owns your food? It might be private equity

With costs rising and growing food safety concerns, state leaders are sounding a warning about private equity targeting Georgia farms.

Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray followed the money to learn how private equity could impact families shopping at the grocery store.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

Months of reporting using county property tax records uncovered millions of dollars being spent to add Georgia farmland to the spreadsheets of international investment groups.

“Who it affects more than anybody is the consumer,” Russ Goodman said.

Goodman runs the 200-year-old family-owned Cogdell Blueberry Farm in south Georgia, where the right soil conditions have let blueberry business thrive.

“It’s kind of like God said, you know this is the place to grow blueberries at,” Russ Goodman said.

According to USDA data, Georgia is one of the top three blueberry producing states in the country, and family growers like Goodman have helped make blueberries big business.

But as a farmer and a state senator, Goodman worries about big corporate money coming for family farms like his.

“It’s kind of a fear of mine, to be honest with you,” Goodman said. “By the time my grandchildren are my age, you may have three or four corporations controlling the world’s food supply.”

Private equity firms — with Wall Street and private investment dollars — are seeking profits by purchasing Georgia family farms.

In the state legislature, Goodman and other lawmakers have worked with Georgia Department of Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper to identify what can be done to protect family farms and keeps costs down for consumers.

“Agriculture and the food supply chain should not be a profit center for private equity,” Harper said. “They’re more focused on profits back to their shareholders than they are trying to ensure that they’re getting a high quality product to a store shelf for consumers to consume.”

MORE 2 INVESTIGATES STORIES:

• Georgia auto insurance rates are dropping for millions of policies after years of increases
• Georgia political insider sentenced to 15 years in $76M First Liberty Ponzi Scheme 

Take just one salad staple as an example. Inside the carrot cooler at family-owned food distributor Alexander Produce, every bag has the name of the same producer: Bolthouse Fresh Foods.

“They are owned by one big private equity,” Griffin Alexander said.

His business helps source and distribute fresh produce to consumers, but for carrots, he’s reliant on buying from processing plants across the state.

Gray went to the south Georgia carrot processing plant behind them. The facility, operated by Bolthouse Fresh Foods, used to be run by their competitor Grimmway Farms.

Both companies are owned by private equity, and between the two of them, they control three out of every four carrots sold in the entire country.

A Forbes analysis found that in the time since those two private equity giants have bought up carrot farms, carrot prices have gone up 40 percent.

In a statement, vice president of corporate affairs for Grimmway Producer Group Dana Brennan told Channel 2 that they do their part to keep healthy food affordable.

“Grimmway has proudly operated in south Georgia for several years, and we’re glad to be part of the agricultural community there,” Brennan said. “We take our responsibility to consumers seriously, and that includes keeping fresh, high-quality carrots accessible and affordable.”

Brennan noted that carrots have historically been a vegetable with stable prices compared to other produce, and she said that’s evidence of a competitive carrot market.

Their competitor Bolthouse Fresh Foods, which leases facilities in Georgia, said they’re invested in Georgia farming families doing well.

“We sympathize with the cost pressures currently facing all farmers—big or small—and root for the success of every farmer in the state,” Kim St. George, the vice president of sales and marketing for Bolthouse Fresh Foods said. “We contract with local Georgia farming families to grow our carrots, so our success is directly tied to their success.”

But state regulators and lawmakers aren’t so sure.

“Whenever you control a significant segment of a commodity at the end of the day you have the ability to start controlling the price,” Harper said.

And in the past few years, others crops have continued attracting new investments from private equity.

Channel 2 Investigates reviewed real estate records and Department of Revenue tax data across every county in Georgia.

In Mitchell County, one of the state’s top farming counties, tax records show three LLCs purchased more than 5600 acres of land, mainly pecan groves.

Put together, that’s approximately the size of Downtown and Midtown Atlanta combined.

When people think of Georgia pecans, they don’t typically picture the city skyline — or the Buckhead office tower tied to all three LLCs.

Each listed their office address at the Atlanta office of international investment giant PGIM. And officers listed on business registration papers filed with the state are the top agriculture executives at PGIM’s agriculture investments arm.

PGIM declined to comment for this story, but pages on their website indicate that the firm has $11 billion invested in agriculture assets between farm properties and agribusiness debt across the agriculture supply chain.

From his warehouse at Alexander Producer, Griffin Alexander can identify what farm each piece of produce came from, and he sees how that kind of private equity money is changing the landscape.

“Each year it seems like that family farmer or that smaller farmer is disappearing and getting swallowed up,” Alexander said. “But who it affects more than anybody is the consumer.”

As the chair of the agriculture committee in the state senate, Goodman says he’s worried about the price families pay for food.

“I promise you, you’ll be paying more for it,” Goodman said. “The returns of private equity and the returns of Wall Street — the returns that they would demand will be a whole lot more than the American farmer has ever been used to getting.”

State leaders like Goodman are targeting what they can do to protect consumers and local farmers as costs continue to rise.

“Would you rather depend on family farmers across this country to feed your family or the CEOs of Wall Street hedge funds and corporations?” Goodman said. “I know what my answer is to that.”

[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]