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Private farmland: Egypt from 50 feddans, Türkiye from 5 hectares.
Minimum operational scale for water infrastructure to work economically. Below this threshold, the water plan doesn't add up.
How Tom Projects evolved from fragmented agricultural land sales into structured farmland projects built around scale, water discipline, and operating control.
Tom Projects began in 2019 with agricultural land development in Türkiye, selling plots from one hectare upward to participants who wanted land ownership with operational support. The model grew quickly. Over several years, it also revealed its structural limits.
The original question was simple: could we give participants real ownership of productive agricultural land without requiring them to become farmers? The answer turned out to be yes — but the structure needed to evolve.
Fragmented land ownership created operational problems at every stage. These are not hypothetical. They are what we observed.
Wells, pumps, and drip irrigation systems do not work economically at one-hectare increments. Water infrastructure built for small plots runs at a loss and tends to degrade. Scale — 10 hectares or more per water system — is the minimum for viable long-term operation.
Hand-off between neighbouring owners created inconsistent protocols. Trees planted at the same time but managed differently produced very different results by year five. A single team managing a single orchard outperforms a dozen owners each managing a slice.
Hundreds of separate titles made unified reporting impractical. Participants received inconsistent updates. Accountability diffused across too many parties. The SPV model solved this: one entity, one set of books, one consistent report.
Decisions made at the small-plot level slowed orchard-level management. Optimisations that would benefit all plots got blocked by individual preferences. Centralised execution with proportional ownership turned out to be the better structure.
The current model narrows future projects to the scale that supports proper irrigation, disciplined operations, and stable long-term management.
Minimum operational scale for water infrastructure to work economically. Below this threshold, the water plan doesn't add up.
One legal entity, not hundreds of individual titles. Clean governance, consistent reporting, defined exit mechanics.
No return to fragmented retail plot logic. Quality over volume. Slower growth than the old model. Better long-term outcomes.
The team that structures the project is the team that runs it. Permanent in-country staff. No passing the operational responsibility to someone else.
Farmland is one of the few asset classes with productive output measured in decades. Olive trees produce commercially for 30+ years. Walnut orchards produce for 50 to 100+ years. Both improve with maturity rather than deteriorating — a profile that distinguishes agricultural assets from most depreciating investments.
Global population is projected to reach approximately 9.7 billion by 2050, while arable land per capita continues to decline. The supply side is constrained by finite usable land. The demand side grows with every additional consumer. The arithmetic of food production favours the owner of productive land.
Agricultural yield is tied to biological output, not equity cycles or interest rate movements. Farmland has historically shown low correlation to public markets and inflation-resistance through food price dynamics. It is not a short-duration asset. It is not liquid. It is long, slow, and durable.