Despite what people think, organic food can be cheaper and more profitable to grow than their chemically produced counterparts.
That was the message angel investor Ali Partovi delivered in an interview yesterday with Mad Money host Jim Cramer, who called Partovi the “polar opposite” of Warren Buffett when it comes to diet.
Cramer said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting over the weekend, Buffett endorsed junk food as an active investor in “old-fashioned, non-natural, non-organic pantry brands” like Dairy Queen, Heinz, Coca-Cola and Kraft.
Partovi, along with his twin brother Hadi Partovi, have been actively investing and starting companies for years. Together, they founded Seattle-based iLike, which was sold to MySpace in 2009, and more recently Code.org, a computer education non-profit.
Now, Ali is on somewhat of a health kick.
Although the job didn’t last, for a short time Ali worked at Hampton Creek, the San Francisco company has the ambitious mission of using technology to produce affordable and healthy food on a mass scale. Yesterday, the company Cramer was interested in talking about was Ali’s investment in Farmland LP, a real estate investment trust that buys land and then “triples or quadruples” profits by converting it to organic, according to Ali.
Today, the San Francisco company owns $50 million in land in Northern California and Oregon, according to its website.
“Organic food is more expensive, but not because organic farming is more expensive,” Ali told Cramer, explaining that it is more expensive because of supply and demand.
“It’s way more profitable to farm organically because you don’t have to buy as many chemicals and fertilizers and you get an organic premium. The challenge for farmers is that you have to go for three years without the chemicals and without the organic premium.”
Check out the full interview in the clip below: