🍑 It’s not all peaches and cream

A mysterious group bought up so much land near San Francisco that it kicked off a federal investigation.

As it turns out, it’s a familiar scheme: Silicon Valley types dreaming of their own little mojo dojo casa utopia.

Since 2018…

… Flannery Associates has spent $800m+ on ~52k acres of mostly uninhabited farmland in Solano County, located ~60 miles northeast of San Francisco, per The New York Times.

The company, led by former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, is sparse on the details, with notable backers including Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and VC Michael Moritz.

The plan is to build a walkable city, bringing thousands of new jobs;  entertainment, shopping, and dining opportunities; a solar wind farm; orchards; and 10k+ acres of parks and open space.

Most importantly? Housing, in a state where costs have skyrocketed amid a shortage.

Is this feasible?

The area is served by a two-lane highway that’s already congested.

But the largest hurdle may be that the land isn’t zoned for residential use. Flannery may need to convince locals to vote yes on a ballot initiative to approve it.

Investors with deep pockets…

… often dream of building brand new cities:

• Former Walmart exec Marc Lore’s Telosa is imagined as a sustainable, pedestrian-friendly city somewhere in the western US — its website notes it’s still scouting locations.
• Peter Thiel wanted to build a self-sustaining, independent libertarian island, co-founding the Seasteading Institute to do so. He left in 2011, but the group is still active.

The problem is that many fail to manifest, while existing cities struggle with outdated infrastructure, homelessness, and other issues.

But Flannery Associates does have a massive amount of land in its corner and California needs more housing, so it’ll be interesting to see if this thing — or any similar project — really happens.

Georgia is known for Martin Luther King Jr., Coca-Cola, college football excellence, and, yes, now presidential mug shots.

But above all, the state is known for peaches.

Until this summer, that is — up to 95% of the Peach State’s crop was uprooted by harsh weather conditions.

• Not just a Georgia problem, peach pain is everywhere this year, from New England to leading producer California, where yield is also down.
• Be warned: If you see peaches this summer, the prices aren’t pretty.

Here’s the good news

You wouldn’t know it from strolling through any gift shop in the state, but peaches aren’t even a top-20 farm product in Georgia, responsible for only 0.58% of the state’s agricultural economy, per The Conversation.

Georgia’s chicken industry — the nation’s largest— is worth ~50x as much as its peaches.

• Poultry and eggs add $28B+ in economic value, fueling a financial powerhouse of a state. (Georgia’s GDP outpaces the likes of Poland, Sweden, and Thailand.)

A bountiful harvest ahead

If the South’s changing climate can’t sustain peach crops in the future, perhaps a change to the “Pecan State” will be in order?

Everywhere you look, pecans are rapidly on the rise, per Food Dive. That’s great news for Georgia.

• The US leads the world in growing the nut and Georgia is top among states. (It also leads the US in peanut production, BTW)

The pecan’s surging popularity could see supplies double by 2027 — international demand is up and grocery products featuring pecans have increased by 54% over the past decade.

But at the end of the day… only one pecan stat really matters: how people pronounce it. An American Pecan Council poll found 34% say “pea-can,” with 66% in favor of “puh-con.”

$500-$8k: how much you’d have to pay to attend Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival II, which he claims to have conceived while in prison for conning the first Fyre Festival’s investors and attendees out of $26m+. The first batch of presale tickets supposedly sold out, despite few event details.

38%: the share of recent homebuyers under age 30 who used family money for the down payment, per Redfin. It’s an eye-popping figure that… actually seems a little low? To put the rising share of “nepo-homebuyers” — those who use a cash gift or inheritance money from relatives — in context: Kids born into homeowning families are far more likely to own in adulthood (79% of current homeowners had a parent who owned their home).

~$76k: in penalties, plus three months in prison, for Nathaniel Chastain, the former OpenSea product manager convicted in a first-of-its-kind crypto insider trading case. Authorities sought more prison time to deter future cryptocurrency crimes, but the judge felt a case built on illegal trades worth ~$50k wouldn’t have been pursued had it not been in the “slightly sexy” crypto space.

79%: the share of seed funding earmarked for diverse founders — women and people of color — that has gone to white women, per Crunchbase data. Through June, diverse founders have tallied $3.2B over ~32k deals, but women of color have only seen 5.2% of that capital, a miniscule slice of an already tiny piece of the overall VC pool (where $238B+ was allocated last year). Companies with all-white male founding teams aren’t hurting, scoring 86.3% of last year’s seed dollars.