Business
The Perfect Investment: RAD Diversified and Income-Producing Farms

Amidst the global lockdown of 2020, Dutch Mendenhall, founder of RADD America, began looking for an alternative to standard residential real-estate investments. So, he turned his analysis to farms and was blown away by the immense potential he saw. After going public in late 2019, RADD America purchased US farmland and made slices of the real estate available at minimum investments of $10,000.
Income-producing farms vs. other real estate asset classes
According to Mendenhall, an apartment complex in today’s US real estate market commands approximately a 4% or 5% cap rate. Farms offer somewhere around a 15% to 20% cap rate.
“When I first began looking at investing in farms, I compared each acre to an apartment or housing unit,” Mendenhall recalls. “The variety that income-producing farms provide is what I really love about them as an opportunity. With one season producing wheat and corn the next, you can double tap — you can raise livestock on top of agriculture. Putting money into the farm only pays off in time. Everything from improving soil to increasing irrigation makes a major impact on potential income, and so much of America’s farmland has fallen into disrepair during the last 20 years.”
When Mendenhall began investing during the early days of the pandemic, sustainable acres of producing farmland sold anywhere from $3,500 to $5,000. Today, he finds that income-producing acres of farmland easily sell for $9,500 to $10,000.
“I’ve seen farmland values almost double during the last couple of years,” Mendenhall says. “Currently, we’re in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Idaho, but we are analyzing land all over America. What reports don’t show is the difference between a properly maintained acre of farmland and an acre that is in disarray. There’s only so much workable farmland on the market today. We’ve hit the tipping point, and now, there’s a scarcity of land for people to buy. If you have the opportunity to purchase amazing agricultural land, you have to pull the trigger quickly.”
Income-producing farms as an asset class
Mendenhall is no stranger to investors. Since 2006, he’s connected them to deals in short sales, wholesaling, residential properties, and storage units, though he admits that every asset class has caused the same excitement as farmland. “At this point, we can’t find enough bargains for our investors,” he says. “They take real pride in their investments and keep asking us for more.”
RADD America takes a true grassroots approach when connecting its investors to farmland. “The farming world is different from any other in real estate,” explains Mendenhall. “We start by having our acquisitions and agricultural teams meet with farmers. When we get ready to brand cattle or plant, all the local farmers come and help. In the same spirit, our teams go out and help the local farmers when it’s their turn to brand and plant. To do it right, you have to build a relationship and a connection that’s quite different than other types of investing.”
RADD America is composed of expert investors and expert farmers. The company offers its investments through fractionalized ownership. In other words, the company purchases one farm and then allows a joint pool of investors to own it together.
“If you don’t have a team that knows how to farm and maximize income, you’re not going to get the best possible return for investors,” warns Mendenhall. “Thankfully, our team isn’t so big for this type of investing that we forget who we are, and we have the economy to scale at a great pace.”
The impact of global competition on income-producing farm investments
RADD America closely monitors global trends. In Mendenhall’s experience, investors win when they move before the market. However, when they move after the market, they lose.
“When Russian first invaded and sparked its war with Ukraine, for example, we kept a close eye on its global impact,” he says. “As one of the largest producers of wheat in the world, we knew that Ukraine — now in the midst of a war — wasn’t going to be able to produce wheat at the same scale, so someone else needs to step in and fill the gap. We’re constantly monitoring what’s happening in the world to stay on top of evolving trends.”
In terms of global competition, Mendenhall is frustrated by foreign entities staking ownership of American farmland and agriculture. In this area, China has positioned itself as the number one threat to the sovereignty of the United States.
“When foreign powers have ownership of agricultural land in the US, it puts us all at risk as Americans,” remarks Mendenhall. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen soil quality erode, closures of meatpacking plants, and numerous fires. The likelihood of nuclear war in this age is very small. The quiet war of buying American agriculture and unsettling the American dollar is the threat we face today.”
Clearly, RADD America has a lot to pay attention to at home and abroad. “We’re monitoring weather patterns and making one-year, three-year, and five-year predictions,” Mendenhall explains. “We’re also paying close attention to interest rates to see where this shifting economy is headed. The up-and-down cycles are faster than they’ve ever been. Monitoring the industry is critical. With expert investors and agricultural specialists from RADD America on your team, farmland can be one of your most promising and rewarding investment opportunities.”
Business
MetaWorx: Building Full-Stack AI Teams, Not Just Automation

Automation still dominates most headlines, yet the returns often fail to meet expectations. A sprawling chatbot rollout might shave a few support tickets, but it rarely shifts the profit-and-loss statement in a lasting way.
McKinsey’s 2025 workplace survey pegs AI’s long-term productivity upside at $4.4 trillion, but only one percent of enterprises say they’ve reached true “AI maturity.” MetaWorx, a Dallas, Texas-based AI employee agency founded by Rachel Kite, argues that the shortfall has nothing to do with models and everything to do with people.
“Treat AI like a point solution and you’ll get point-solution results,” shares Kite. “You need a roster that can carry the ball from raw data to governance, or the whole thing stalls at the proof-of-concept phase.”
The pod blueprint
When a plug-and-play automation script collapsed under real-world data drift, costing Kite a lucrative contract, she sketched the six-person “pod” that now anchors every MetaWorx engagement:
- An infrastructure architect to tame compute costs.
- A data engineer to secure and shape pipelines.
- An applied scientist to prototype models against live feedback loops.
- An MLOps engineer to automate rollback and retraining.
- A domain product lead translates forecasts into features users actually notice.
- Ethics and compliance analysts to stress test outputs for bias and keep the audit.
The team’s first sprint still delivers a quick-win bot — “small enough to calm the CFO,” jokes Kite — but the roadmap quickly pivots to reliability, explainability, and eventually optimization. By tying every algorithmic decision to a quantifiable business metric, the pods turn AI from a science project into a growth lever.
Recruiting for curiosity, not credentials
With Bain & Company predicting a global AI-skills crunch through 2027, MetaWorx has stopped chasing unicorn résumés. Instead, it hires “adjacent athletes”: a computer-vision PhD who hops from medical imaging to warehouse surveillance, or a former journalist who recasts her nose for story into prompt-engineering finesse.
“Domain expertise expires fast,” Kite says. “What doesn’t expire is the instinct to ask better questions.” The result is a lattice of overlapping skills that stays flexible when models wander into the long tail of edge-case data.
A culture of rapid experiments
Inside MetaWorx, every idea faces the same litmus test: ship something — anything — into a user’s hands within 21 days. The “three-week rule” forces prototypes into the wild early, where failure is cheap and feedback is swift. Post-mortems, including cost overruns, are circulated company-wide, erasing any stigma associated with missteps.
That laboratory mindset powers velocity. “Our first model is almost always wrong,” Kite admits, “but version 1.0 is the tuition we pay for version 2.0.” The philosophy echoes her TEDx talk on resilience: progress is iterative, not heroic.
How leaders can steal the playbook
Executives itching to replicate MetaWorx’s results don’t need a blank check. Kite offers a five-step sequence:
- Inventory pain points, not tools: Walk the P&L line by line and tag the friction you can measure.
- Map the stack to the problem: A recommendation engine, for instance, requires behavior data, retraining triggers, and feedback capture — automation alone won’t suffice.
- Stand up a pod: Reassign existing talent into a cross-functional tiger team before hiring externally; the chemistry test is free.
- Measure the story, not just the statistic: Pair model accuracy with human-scale metrics like ticket backlog or employee churn.
- Budget for the boring: Reserve at least 30 percent of spend for MLOps and governance; Stanford’s HAI review links most AI failures to neglected upkeep.
Taken together, those steps shift AI from a pilot novelty to an operational habit that compounds value rather than topping out after an initial PR splash.
Character still scales faster than code
MetaWorx plans to double its headcount this year, yet Kite insists the secret isn’t a proprietary framework or a monster war chest. It’s credibility. Clients see a founder who has wrestled with the same outages and surprise bills they face. That authenticity converts skeptics faster than any algorithmic novelty.
“Tools level out,” Kite says. “Culture compounds.”
The insight lands in a marketplace still dazzled by generative fireworks. Yes, MetaWorx ships models and dashboards, but its true product is a mindset: resilience over rigidity, questions over credentials, experiments over edicts. In Kite’s world, automation is merely the appetizer. The main course is a full-stack team that knows why the model matters to the business and who owns its success after launch day.
And that, Kite argues, is how AI finally graduates from cost-cutter to growth engine, one curious pod at a time.
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