The New York billionaire seeking to change agriculture with Colorado farmland

Story first appeared in:

LAMAR

Stefan Soloviev was in his 20s when he began shopping for farmland in Kansas, jap Colorado and New Mexico.

The born-and-raised New York Metropolis child was studying the ropes of farming and he visited Prowers County for the primary time again then and needed to take a look at a big farm he’d simply acquired. 

“It was 6 miles off the paved highway and I’m driving and all the things seems the identical and I’m driving and driving and I lastly get to the property and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m in the course of nowhere.’ And I had a little bit of a panic assault,” he says throughout a wandering interview with The Colorado Solar. “I’ll always remember that first outing right here. It’s gotten simpler. You regulate. You regulate to your environment. You begin to turn out to be a part of the neighborhood.”

Since he purchased his first 309-acre farm in Sumner County, Kansas, within the late Nineties, Soloviev has turn out to be one of the crucial influential members of Colorado’s Japanese Plains farming neighborhood. He’s amassed greater than 400,000 acres — 625 sq. miles — rating the 48-year-old because the Twenty sixth-largest landowner within the nation. He runs about 5,000 head of cattle in New Mexico and grows about one million bushels of milo — a kind of sorghum — and wheat, in addition to grass for his cattle — in Colorado and Kansas. 

In early Could, he spent 36 hours serving to to load a 110-grain-car unit prepare along with his personal and his neighbors’ milo at his newly constructed, 5 million-bushel Weskan Grain elevator in jap Kiowa County. The prepare trundled the harvest on his 122-mile Colorado Pacific Railroad — referred to as the Towner Line — to the nationwide rail community east of Pueblo. 

Soloviev purchased that railroad in 2018 for $10 million after a protracted battle with an organization that deliberate to scrap the complete line. He spent $3.5 million rehabbing the tracks that created communities like Arlington, Haswell, Eads, Chivington, Brandon, Sheridan Lake and Towner as a part of his imaginative and prescient to construct “a farmer-friendly, farmer-first” firm that may compete with worldwide agricultural conglomerates that management a lot of the grain grown within the nation.

It was the primary time a prepare had run on the historic Towner Line since 1996. And it was the fruits of practically 20 years of labor for Soloviev, the son of a New York Metropolis actual property baron who constructed his personal agricultural empire on the Colorado plains.

“I name it the best achievement of my life,” he says.

Hours after loading that prepare in Could, he jumped on a business flight to New York the place he made a uncommon public look at an actual property discussion board hosted by The Actual Deal enterprise journal. The founding father of The Actual Deal, Amir Korangy, saved asking Soloviev about his New York Metropolis actual property plans whereas Soloviev steered the dialog again to railroads and farming. With a bandage on his hand from an damage sustained from loading the prepare vehicles the night time earlier than, Soloviev expounded on his mission to construct his Weskan Grain firm to compete with international companies like Cargill — which reported $177 billion in income for 2023 — and Archer Daniels Midland — which reported $97 billion in income for 2023. 

“I don’t want cash. Cash is just not essential. I wish to construct this ag firm and make it wonderful and I actually assume I can due to the folks I’ve. However cash, it simply doesn’t imply a lot to me,” he advised the New York Metropolis crowd, urging them to “step out of the bubble so lots of you might be in” to see the huge, not-real-estate markets exterior town.

Soloviev has tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders on each arms. On his proper forearm are railroad rails that begin splintered close to his elbow however come collectively into tidy tracks close to his wrist. Every tie marks an essential yr of his life, he explains. He didn’t fairly have all of it collectively in his early 30s however he had a route, he says. 

“Then all of it begins coming collectively proper right here,” he says, tracing his finger towards his wrist. 

48 with 22 kids

Right here’s the place Soloviev is at proper now: He’s 48 however might cross for 30. He’s single and has 22 children, all below the age of 21. He’s remodeling the agricultural trade in jap Colorado, offering each storage and prepare shipments for native farmers with two railroads and a brand new grain elevator that he plans to develop to carry 7 million bushels.  

Yeah, we have to know extra about these children. He married Stacey, a Mormon from Montana, at age 22 they usually divorced a decade in the past after having 11 children. 

“Then life occurred,” says Soloviev, who lives in Florida however spent a lot of the previous decade in Sacramento, California. “The final 10 years have been fairly a run.”

The Land Report’s annual listing of the highest 100 landowners within the nation for 2022 ranks him Twenty sixth with 408,000 acres in Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. (That’s various acres however not even 1 / 4 of the two.2 million acres owned by Colorado cable magnate John Malone, who’s No. 2 on the 2022 Land Report land baron listing.) However as of December, when he took out full-page adverts in native newspapers throughout jap Colorado, Soloviev says he’s carried out shopping for land. 

After twenty years of paying as little as $200 an acre for farms throughout the plains of Kansas and Colorado, he now desires to lease all his farmland again to native farmers. If all goes as deliberate he’ll cease farming on roughly 130,000 acres in jap Colorado and western Kansas, and let different farmers develop grain to retailer in his Weskan Grain elevator at Sheridan Lake close to the Kansas border. 

“As a result of I can see that the farmer is affected by me being profitable off the land,” he says, noting how the value of acres has appreciated exponentially since he first started shopping for farms “and that’s cash farmers might have made.”

Soloviev was in his 20s when he left New York and the East Coast and headed west to farm nation. He didn’t get alongside along with his father, actual property tycoon and artwork collector Sheldon Solow. Soloviev modified his title again to its Russian roots and moved West. He traded commodities, together with grain. He noticed alternatives within the agricultural trade, particularly if he might management the precise manufacturing of the commodity. He moved his younger and rising household to Wichita, Kansas, and Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and spent years working with native farmers. 

Within the early 2000s, he began shopping for extra land. His dad, with an almost $5 billion portfolio of artwork, house buildings and workplace house in New York Metropolis, was not a part of this plan. 

He labored with farm credit score bureaus — he fastidiously spells out the title of a New Mexico banker who shepherded all his offers — and leveraged the federal farm credit score system to spend many hundreds of thousands of federally sponsored loans on land with 30-year rates of interest round 2%. The federal farm program provides low-interest loans for land that shall be used for crops. 

“I believe there was animosity from the land I’ve purchased … effectively, not animosity however annoyance as a result of I used to be successful each public sale, you recognize, for 20 years,” he says. “I purchased all the things as a result of I knew it was going to go up and I might purchase all the things as a result of I knew tips on how to play the farm credit score system.”

As he strikes away from land acquisition and rising crops, Soloviev desires farmers to see him in another way. He’s not a competitor attempting to outgrow them. He’s the man combating to get one of the best value for everybody’s grain. 

So the pitch seems like this: Lease his farmland at market charges. Develop your personal grains. Truck them to Soloviev’s grain elevator near the Colorado-Kansas border. Then ship the grain on his new Colorado Pacific Railroad to Pueblo to entry Union Pacific’s nationwide rail community. Soloviev says ultimately he desires to develop into the worldwide exporting enterprise with cargo ships that may transfer Colorado grain “so far as I can take it.”

“I imagine with all this, I can get farmers probably the most amount of cash for his or her grain,” he says. “Subsequent on my listing is moving into the exporting enterprise, possibly with a devoted port. Some years are going to be native years, with no exporting. However in export years, that farmer who’s trusting me with their grain and I get it to a port and onto my very own bulk carriers to take it to the tip person wherever on this planet, that’s extra margin for me and extra money for farmers. Particularly the farmers who imagine in me. And there’s plenty of them.”

Colorado farmers ready and watching

John Stulp has by no means met Soloviev however he actually is aware of about him. The previous state Commissioner of Agriculture and Prowers County commissioner whose household has farmed and ranched in southeastern Colorado for a lot of a long time says he has “combined feelings” about Soloviev’s function on the Japanese Plains. 

Typically, longtime farmers on the plains are leery of somebody coming into the area and shopping for land with cash that was made exterior of agriculture, Stulp says. 

It’s already laborious for dryland farmers who depend on just-enough rain to develop grain to pay their payments and “it’s actually laborious to compete with individuals who are available with money they created from different investments,” says Stulp, repeating a standard lament throughout Colorado as folks from out-of-state purchase houses, spiking prices for longtime residents. 

In his a long time of farming, Stulp can not recall a person like Soloviev coming in and consolidating farms. That consolidation means there are fewer family-owned farms within the area and that has a ripple impact on the social cloth of plains communities, Stulp says. However he’s intrigued by Soloviev’s concentrate on integrating railroad-accessible storage and transportation into his enterprise and by the billionaire’s promise to stop shopping for land. 

“It will likely be attention-grabbing to see what this (promise to now not purchase land) will do to future land values,” Stulp says

And that’s the place Stulp and his neighbors principally are with Soloviev. Watching and ready. Possibly his push into storage and transportation will present extra alternatives for farmers, with extra choices for promoting their grain in numerous markets. 

When Stulp began a long time in the past, he must truck his grain a number of hours throughout two railroad tracks to achieve a railroad that may ship his wheat and milo to markets within the West and the Pacific Northwest. The enlargement of the Towner Line means he can rapidly transfer his grain south to ports within the Gulf of Mexico.

“I believe he might be opening up new alternatives for not simply present farmers, however younger folks hoping to get into agriculture,” Stulp says. “There are undoubtedly positives and there are negatives too. However I don’t see them as large positives or large negatives. I believe most of us out listed below are going to attend and see how this all unfolds within the coming a long time. I imply if he’s on this for the long run and he’s bought that many children, I wager there are some entrepreneurs in there who will provide you with much more new concepts for his lands out right here.”

Soloviev is assured his plan will work as he spends each different week — alongside along with his 20-year-old son Quintin — in jap Colorado, assembly with farmers and displaying them a brand new, native choice for rising crops and shifting their grain to market. 

The main agribusinesses that serve jap Colorado — Bartlett Grain Co. out of Kansas Metropolis, Cargill out of Minnesota and Scoular out of Omaha — aren’t native, he says. 

“I’m primarily based in Sheridan Lake, Colorado. I’m the native selection,” he says. “We’re going to compete and we’re going to present everybody we’re your best option. I’m the chairman of a large conglomerate however that is my precedence.”

He and Quintin principally go to with farmers when they’re in Colorado, negotiating leases for his land. 

“Everybody desires to lease floor,” he says. “Half the farmers we go to of their homes have a look at one another and say, ‘When was the final time the proprietor or CEO of Scoular or Bartlett was in my front room having a beer with me and speaking about shopping for wheat?’ We’re shaking issues up in western Kansas and jap Colorado.”

Peter Martin, an accounting guide who has labored with Soloviev for the previous decade, mentioned Soloviev “has extra respect for rural America than he does for Manhattan.”

Soloviev isn’t prepared to completely endorse that, a minimum of not with a reporter. However he’s connecting with rural farmers. 

“Hopefully our manner of being a farmer-first, farmer-friendly native grain elevator, in 5 years I can get everybody out right here to imagine in me,” Soloviev says. “I’ve not confirmed it to them but. However I’ll. It’s my aim to take action. Simply be affected person with me.” 

“That is the primary inning”  

The Soloviev Group empire is numerous and rising. He’s bought close to full occupancy of the long-lasting 9 West 57th Avenue skyscraper his father in-built Midtown Manhattan in 1974, which has 1.4 million sq. ft of workplace house. He’s planning 1,325 houses, a on line casino, museum, lodge and practically 5 acres of inexperienced house on six acres in Manhattan’s East Facet. He’s bought farms and vineyards on 2,000 acres within the North Fork peninsula of New York’s Lengthy Island. There are hashish operations and a winery in California. Mining in Nevada. House constructing in Florida and Texas. Wine bars in South Florida and New York Metropolis. Huge landscaping corporations in Florida and New York.

He’s bought near 350,000 acres deeded and leased in New Mexico the place he runs round 5,000 head of cattle. There are farms in Quebec. A nascent photo voltaic and wind vitality challenge is erecting photo voltaic farms on 7,500 acres in Colorado and 70 wind generators in New Mexico. He’s been speaking about reviving a minor league baseball stadium in Rhode Island. He’s bought a charitable basis that serves underprivileged children and not too long ago despatched $1 million to Ukraine.

The on line casino, the skyscraper, the wineries, the ballpark, the homebuilding, “that’s the flashy stuff,” he says. 

“My precedence in my lifetime is that this,” he says, slapping a desk in an empty workplace at his accountant’s headquarters in Lamar, the place he meets repeatedly along with his Colorado workforce. “As a result of I imagine this — all of the farmland and dealing with the grain and exporting it and being the primary domestically owned, vertically built-in ag firm in Colorado and Kansas and all our meat manufacturing in New Mexico — is an important factor I’ll do in my life. It’s all long run and that is the primary inning. I’m not going to cease till I get there. It’s my lifelong challenge.”

Shopping for railroads

Soloviev mentioned he was “considering exterior the field” when he made a play to purchase Union Pacific’s long-dormant Tennessee Move Line between Dotsero and Cañon Metropolis. He thought possibly the road would work to maneuver grain west. He dropped his $10 million bid — which included a plan to speculate near $278 million in repairs for the roughly 160 miles of observe that has not seen trains since 1997 — in Could, saying he needed to concentrate on “having an important relationship” with Union Pacific. (The builders of the seemingly stalled Uinta Basin Railway challenge in Utah have additionally proposed reviving the Tennessee Move Line and that group’s plan stoked considerations that crude oil might be shifting by means of communities like Avon, Minturn, Leadville, Buena Vista and Salida.)

As a substitute of pursuing Tennessee Move, Soloviev paid $10.7 million for the historic San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad in November 2022. The 155-mile railroad connects the San Luis Valley with the nationwide rail community south of Pueblo. A neighborhood effort within the valley is pushing to develop leisure trails that may comply with and intersect with the railroad tracks and Soloviev is amenable to working with locals to permit entry. One other bidder for that railroad, Denver-based Omnitrax, raised considerations with San Luis Valley recreation promoters with a coverage that has prohibited bike paths close to the corporate’s practically two dozen railroads. 

Soloviev known as the San Luis Valley railroad — which he renamed the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande after buying it out of a chapter public sale — “secondary.” He mentioned with clients like agribusiness conglomerate Wilbur-Ellis in Monte Vista and the valley’s vibrant assortment of potato farmers, he’s assured he could make the railroad “worthwhile and work long run.” However he admits his focus now could be on the Towner Line. He’s visited the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande line 4 instances prior to now yr and mentioned he’s “open to something” so long as the railroad stays worthwhile. 

“If leisure trails are essential to folks in that space, then I’m keen to take heed to them,” he says. “I imply, I’m not going to be placing a lot cash into recreation, however merely permitting entry, 100% I’m superb with that.”

Soloviev mentioned he could be keen to work with smaller companies that wish to construct sidings and warehouses subsequent to his tracks within the San Luis Valley.

“We wish to generate enterprise and work with anybody over there. We wish to make that railroad work,” he says. “I must be taught extra about that space. It’s so lovely.”

Mick Daniel, the manager director of San Luis Valley Nice Outside, has spoken with Soloviev just a few instances about trails alongside the railroad right-of-way. Daniel in 2022 obtained one of many first federally funded grants provided by the Colorado outside recreation workplace to assist plan the 154-mile “Coronary heart of the Valley Path” that can knit sections of trails right into a valleywide recreation path. 

“It took him a minute to orient with who we have been, however he undoubtedly expressed curiosity in working with us on the path hall,” Daniel says, noting that Soloviev gave him his cellphone quantity. (The opposite billionaires within the San Luis Valley, New York financier and conservationist Louis Bacon and Texas-based William Harrison, don’t share their cellphone numbers with many residents of the valley.)

Soloviev was clear with Daniel that he needed to function a worthwhile railroad and Daniel was equally clear in his place that recreation and an out of doors economic system may help help a vibrant neighborhood that may feed the success of the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande Railroad. 

“I believe the leisure economic system right here can work alongside the railroad and assist the valley,” Daniel says. 

Totally different than his dad

Later this month Soloviev will start his biweekly journeys to Colorado with Quintin, who’s the third in cost on the Soloviev Group. The night time earlier than the 2 sat down for lengthy conferences in Lamar final month, they flew into Denver Worldwide Airport. Soloviev pulls out his cellphone and reveals a selfie of the pair grinning behind a Spirit Airways aircraft. 

“Hey, we’re economical,” he says. “There’s no motive to blow cash if you don’t should. These are some actual tight seats, you recognize.”

Quintin’s equivalent twin, Hayden, additionally works carefully along with his dad and is in control of the group’s Atlantic Area — orchards, vineyards, landscaping corporations and a lodge — alongside his mother, Stacey. (Soloviev says his former spouse is “my greatest good friend.”)

Soloviev didn’t work along with his dad like that. The famed artwork collector and cantankerous New York Metropolis developer Sheldon Solow was famend for protracted lawsuits and he didn’t have a detailed relationship along with his sons.

“My father didn’t know tips on how to discuss to a 20-year-old. He didn’t know tips on how to spend time with a 20-year-old and have enjoyable,” he mentioned. “My relationship with Quintin is 100% polar reverse of what I had with my father.”

Two years earlier than Solow died in November 2020 at age 92, Soloviev returned to work along with his father and commenced to take the reins of the household’s estimated $4.4 billion property. Soloviev restructured and fashioned his Soloviev Group and offered a lot of the New York Metropolis house buildings he had managed for his father however retained the flagship skyscraper on West 57th Avenue, referred to as the Solow Constructing. After a renovation, Soloviev doubled the occupancy of the swanky skyscraper with views of Central Park and opened a ground-floor artwork gallery that includes his father’s assortment of masterpieces.

“I’m part of nearly each one in every of my child’s lives. I’m nearer to some than others. When you may have 22 children that’s only a actuality,” he says. “The youngsters that I’m closest to are past my greatest associates.”

Soloviev can discuss enterprise for hours, not often pausing between centered descriptions of alternatives and challenges. He stutters a bit when requested what he does for enjoyable. He’s bought a girlfriend they usually journey after they can. He’s in a aggressive flag-football league in Florida and says “I can maintain my very own” in opposition to gamers half his age. Once more with the cellphone and a video of him nimbly navigating a gridiron and speaking trash with teammates and opponents. 

“Shut the fuck up.You ought to be in a library,” somebody yells within the video on his cellphone. 

Soloviev strikes by means of numerous teams. He’s hanging in wheat fields with Colorado farmers at some point. Wearing a customized Armani swimsuit negotiating complicated New York Metropolis offers the following after which jostling with athletes on a lush Florida pitch the following. Within the hours between, he’s flying along with his son in economic system seats.

“I really feel like I can match into any group, yeah,” he mentioned. “It’s been a loopy life. It’s been wild and I made it wild, you recognize.”

Kind of Story: Information

Primarily based on information, both noticed and verified straight by the reporter, or reported and verified from educated sources.