BrasilAgro: A Bitter Harvest Year, Priced As Half a Land Bank

A BRL 90 million loss from frosted cane and bad cotton, a portfolio that still rose to BRL 3.34 billion, and the first hint that the perennial seller might turn buyer.

AGRO3.SA · Earnings Call · 2026-09-04

A Loss Year That Isn't Really About the Loss

BrasilAgro closed harvest 2025/2026 with a sour set of numbers. Management opened with the toll: “We closed up with BRL 926 million of net revenue, BRL 100 million in adjusted EBITDA accumulated or accrued profit, BRL 90 million loss in losses negative.” — André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04 That is an improvement on the prior year's BRL 138 million loss, but André Guillaumon did not dress it up — it was, in his words, a year of adversities where "numbers are tough and they give us a bitter taste." Two crops did the damage. Sugarcane lost roughly 650,000 tons to a double blow — a frost hit in São Paulo and wildfires in Maranhão — erasing close to BRL 60 million of EBITDA. Gustavo Lopez tied it to the crop's fragile economics: as sugarcane harvested volumes fell, the fixed per-hectare cost could not be diluted. Cotton followed with quality and productivity problems that forced a deliberate area cut. Layer on a weak soy price environment through the year and the loss is arithmetic, not a broken model.

The Game Changer Is the Dirt, Not the Grain

The reason this is not simply a bad ag story is that the asset underneath kept appreciating. BrasilAgro's internal portfolio mark moved from BRL 3.1 billion to BRL 3.34 billion, and management leaned hard on that distinction:

If we were a company that was just passive buying mature land, that would be a different scenario. Here we are really driving the wheel here and really working to have the maturity of this area... if you consider this to be a real engine or booster in your business, we can still generate value for shareholders.
André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04

That Area maturity engine — land that gains value as it goes from pasture to three, four, five crops — is the company-unique theme, echoed in André's term the maturity curve. It is why a loss-making harvest year can coexist with a rising NAV. And it is why the market's valuation gap is so jarring: an individual investor question on the call pointed out a share price of BRL 19 against a NAV of BRL 38.17 — roughly a 50% discount to the land. The board's answer was a BRL 30 million dividend, which André frankly called “more of a symbol than an actual big event,” — André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04 deliberately choosing deleveraging over a buyback that would retire only ~0.9% of the company. This is not a new argument — the buyback-vs-dividend-vs-sell-land question has been asked since at least the 2021-11-08 call — so treat the discount as the market's standing verdict on a patient, illiquid land compounder rather than a fresh insight.

The Quiet Pivot: From Seller to Buyer

The genuinely new note in this call was direction of travel. For years management framed itself as a net seller of farms, waiting for high land prices. On the 2023-05-13 call André said plainly: “we will be more sellers than buyers, we are being more sellers than buyers.” — André Guillaumon, CEO · 2023-05-13 This quarter he flipped it when asked about capital allocation: “If we are going to be more of a seller or more of a buyer, I think we should be more of a buyer, right?” — André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04 He flagged roughly 55% of the portfolio now sitting in developed, sale-ready land — a stockpile built to be monetized, but also, apparently, the moment to hunt for bargains as El Niño-driven disparity widens between farms and regions. None of this abandons the house religion. Go back to the 2021 call and André described “the importance of being an anti-cyclic when everyone wants to buy farms, we sell. And when everyone wants to sell, we buy,” — Andre Guillaumon, CEO · 2021-09-01 and Gustavo stated the doctrine most cleanly two years ago:

Our challenge is to be an anti-cyclic company. We have to sell farms when everyone is buying and buy farms when everyone is selling. This is the magic of our business.
Gustavo Lopez, CFO · 2022-11-12

What changed is the reading of where we are in that cycle.

Riding a Market Wave — With One Company-Unique Twist

BrasilAgro is not farming in a vacuum. The global theme board is crowded with the same weather and input pressures: El Niño ranks as one of the market's hottest keywords this quarter, alongside Fertilizer production and a cluster of fuel-cost and Middle-East supply keywords. BrasilAgro is squarely on that wave. André walked through MAP fertilizer going from roughly BRL 580–600 a ton at purchase to BRL 800–850, and called the year one with “so much geopolitical volatility.” — André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04 His commodity map — sugar recovering, corn firming, ethanol frustrating — reads like the commodity prices tape itself. Here is the twist that separates the company line from the sector line: BrasilAgro hedged its way out of the pain. It locked the dollar at BRL 5.72 and soy at Chicago 1094, and for the coming harvest has already priced soy above USD 12 versus USD 11 last year — “more than 10% in the price, and that is just pure EBITDA.” — André Guillaumon, Executive · 2026-09-04 That is the payoff of the land-transformation model: when the photograph looks ugly, the film still has a better second act. Save for the familiar cost of capital squeeze (management pegs it near 14%) and the lot of volatility in the real, the operating picture is set to inflect upward. The honest read: this is a small-cap (~USD 1.9 billion) land trust wrapping a volatile farming operation, reporting a loss but re-marking its land higher, lurching cautiously from net seller to potential buyer, and trading at half its appraised value. Not a breakout, but the turn in the buyer/seller stance is a real signal worth watching — and with no price-tape data provided here, the NAV discount remains the only valuation the reader can hang a hat on.