Arable Capital Partners adds former LDC exec as VP

Washington State Investment Board-backed Arable Capital Partners has hired former Louis Dreyfus Company executive Scott Hogan as a vice-president at the Bellevue, Washington headquartered investment firm.

In addition to assisting in overall strategy, Hogan’s role will focus on transactional work and due diligence on acquisitions, financial analysis and portfolio management, the firm wrote in a statement.

Arable declined to provide more detail or make Hogan available for an interview.

Hogan joins Arable after a two-year stint as managing director at Pasadena, California-headquartered family office Holdsworth & Co, a position that included investments in public and private equity as well as real estate, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Previously, Hogan participated in a Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) training program before holding New York-based positions with Société Générale
and Merrill Lynch, according to his profile.

After re-joining LDC as head of North American business development in 2009 and holding that position for three years, Hogan acted as LDC Treasurer for about one and a half years. He then assumed the role of president at Louis Dreyfus Citrus, a position he held for four years ending in June 2016.

In that role, Hogan oversaw a restructuring of business activities and strategy during a crop disease crisis that included managing sales activity, budgeting, and process-improvement measures, among other responsibilities, his profile shows.

Arable, which was established in 2016 and secured a $300 million commitment from the $132 billion WSIB in 2017, focuses on hold periods of 15 years or more for majority and minority investments into US West Coast companies engaged in agricultural logistics, storage, inputs or other sub-sectors.

In January, Arable acquired Bakersfield, California-headquartered irrigation services provider US Irrigation for an undisclosed sum and combined the company with other irrigation companies it had previously acquired under Laurel Ag + Water Solutions, a platform the firm established last year.

Arable managing director Greg Richards told a regional investment publication earlier this month that prior to establishing the firm, he had previously invested in the region’s ag sector in 2011, when he co-founded HarvestWest Investments. That firm went on to raise approximately $36 million to support acquisition of more than 13,000 acres of farmland in Idaho, Oregon and Washington between 2011 and 2017, according to Richards.

That experience – combined with regional networks maintained by managing director Derek Yurosek, whose family has a long history in California farming and who previously served as head of agricultural operations at Bill and Melinda Gates’ private holding company BMGI/Cascade Investment – has helped Arable quickly establish its presence in the market, Richards said.

“The person who doesn’t like private equity firms, he doesn’t like them because [the private equity investor] flies in from New York, shows up in a suit, maybe he has a big belt on to look like he’s a cowboy, and talks about how he’s going to take this company to the next level and use leverage to financially re-engineer the production facility,” Richards said.

Richards described how after an active string of transactions last year, Arable has no immediate plans to raise new capital.

“We did six transactions last year,” Richards said. “That’s a crazy number. If we did two deals in a year, that would be a lot. Now we need to focus on managing our portfolio.”