Jack McCarthy built a $350M pistachio and almond holdco buying one farm at a time

The Setup American farming never consolidated the way dentistry, HVAC, or accounting did. The land is still owned by tens of thousands of mom-and-pop operators, many of them aging out, most of them running books and irrigation schedules the same way their parents did. Jack McCarthy looked at that fragmentation and saw what a search-fund operator sees in a regional plumbing market: aging sellers, stagnant tech, enduring demand, and almost no institutional competition at the small end. In 2017 he co-founded Gold Leaf Farming to buy pistachio and almond orchards one at a time and hold them. The Deal Gold Leaf is not one deal; it is 27 of them. Cumulative purchase value sits at roughly $350 million, with orchards spread across a 1,000-mile arc from Northern California down through the Central Valley and into Arizona. Each farm is its own transaction, its own seller, its own water situation, its own tree age and yield profile. The structure borrows from several playbooks at once. It has the acquisition cadence of a search-backed holdco, the long-duration capital profile of real estate, the operational discipline of PE, and the greenfield orientation of a zero-to-one startup where modernization is the alpha. What it explicitly is not: a roll-up engineered for a five-to-seven-year exit. Operating Moves The thesis rests on a handful of unglamorous observations about permanent crops: - Pistachio and almond trees are 20-to-30-year assets. The underwriting has to match the asset life, which is why traditional PE funds struggle to hold them properly. - Tech adoption in orchard management (irrigation scheduling, soil monitoring, harvest logistics, labor systems) is a decade or more behind what the best operators run. - Retirement-age sellers want a clean exit to someone who will actually keep farming the land, not strip it. - Water rights, not acreage, are the real asset. Deal quality is a function of the water story. Gold Leaf's edge is not a proprietary crop technique. It is being the buyer who shows up, closes, and runs the farm like an operator rather than an absentee landlord. Operating Lessons - Match capital duration to asset duration. If the underlying asset takes 25 years to pay back its replanting cost, a 7-year fund will force the wrong decisions. Raise money that can stay. - Fragmented industries with aging owners are acquirable even when the assets are capital-heavy, as long as your capital is patient. - Roll-ups do not require centralization. Gold Leaf's farms are geographically scattered; the platform value is in back office, water management, agronomy, and procurement, not in physical consolidation. - The pitch to a retiring seller is emotional before it is financial. A buyer who commits to keep farming wins deals a financial buyer cannot. - In permanent crops, the scoreboard is water rights and tree age, not top-line acres. Underwrite the constraint. Where They Are Now