Well, thank you, Michael. I'll start with a brief overview, as I do each time.
We have a lot of farmland. We currently own about 103,000 acres on 150 farms and over 55,000 acre feet, which is the way they measure water assets. 1 acre foot is equal to about 326,000 gallons.
So we own over 18 billion gallons of water. And together, the land and the water are all valued at a total of about $1.3 billion.
Our farms are in 15 different states and more importantly, in 29 different growing regions, and our water assets are mostly in California. Farms are leased to over 65 different tenant farmers and people who manage the farms there are a lot of people involved. And the tenants on these farms are growing over 60 different crops, mostly of fruits and vegetables and nuts. And you can find this produce in other sections of the grocery store as well as in the produce section, which is where most of the crops that are grown on any of our farms are sold. We mentioned in previous calls that we continue to be cautious with new investments because our cost of capital remains high. Cap rates on most row crops and farmlands are so low that today, because of those situations, the value of those crops and land remain very high.
We also believe it's a good time to conserve cash given the uncertainty of the produce and nut marketplace. And the Federal Reserve is holding interest rates too high today.
So hopefully, they'll change their mind and reduce it down as time goes on. We completed some farmland sales recently. In December, we sold 11 blueberry farms in Michigan. These are farms that have been giving us some problems. We recorded an impairment charge on these farms in the third quarter and then had a small loss in the fourth quarter when we completed the sale. But these farms had a negative impact on net operating income of about $400,000 in 2024. We didn't see a clear path back to profitability, so we sold these farms. In January, we sold 5 farms in Florida at a sizable gain that represented about a 40% premium over what we had paid for at 6.5 years. Farmland values in most parts of Florida have continued to go up at a faster pace than the rest of the market, but it was a time for us to sell some of these. And finally, in February, we sold 2 farms in the Midwest for a total gain of about 9% over what we paid for them. We had originally budgeted these farms as potato farms, but the market shifted more toward corn and soybean in this region.
So we felt the resulting cap rates didn't make sense for us to continue holding them.
Regarding leasing activity since the beginning of the fourth quarter, we've executed 4 new lease or amendment agreements, all in the Western permanent crop farms. On 2 of these leases, we adjusted the lease structure in a similar manner to what we've done in a few other farms recently. That is we eliminated the base rent or in some cases, provided the tenants with some cash allowances to grow their produce. In exchange, we significantly increased the participation rent component of these leases the majority of which will be recognized in the second half of 2025. So we won't have income from these leases, but in the near term, but when we sell the crops, we'll get a big piece of it. And I want to touch a little bit more. We started in prior calls, marketing conditions around many of the permanent crop farms in the West, particularly nuts and some of the grapes have been hampered by lower crop prices and higher input costs that is fertilizer and those kind of things. And of course, the borrowing costs have remained high.
As such, we decided to adjust the lease structure on 5 farms to help the growing minimize that fixed cost, but also allow us to participate greatly in the upside. In essence, we're accepting a percentage of the gross crop sales instead of fixed rent payments. This may be a big win for us come the end of this year. If we assume the worst-case scenario and assume that we have a total crop loss on these 5 farms, meaning we have no crop proceeds from the harvest, we expect the crop insurance on these farms to pay us enough money to cover all of our cost and also provide us with a profit. It will be a small profit, but nonetheless a profit. And this is government insurance.
So as a result, we don't worry about them not being able to pay. We've not done this that often. And of course, our hopes are that we have good production overall and that we don't have to use the crop insurance at all. There are a few additional properties that we're looking at possibly doing a similar structure on. We're still reviewing the projections. And I think the projections will probably look good on another 2 or 3 of these, so we may end up in that.
Our current plan is to move forward with the structure for 2025 and harvest for these farms and then hopefully revert back to more traditional structure next year or we may sell some of these properties along the way.
The other 2 leases we executed recently on permanent crop farms are expected to result in a year-over-year decrease in annual NOI of about $180,000. The net operating income is how we measure most of the things in our business.
So that's a hit, I hate to say it. It's not that much, but nonetheless, just hate to lose anything. And just as a note on our annual row crops, which make up about half [Technical Difficulty] We continue to see a steady appreciation and consistent rent growth in this category.
During 2024, we renewed 12 different leases on annual row crops, not permanent crops. And these renewals are expected to result in an aggregate increase in annual net operating income of about $556,000 or about a 14% increase over prior leases.
Looking ahead, we have 3 leases scheduled to expire over the next 6 months. And in total, they only make up about 1.5% of our total lease revenue.
So we should get those done this year and not lose anything there, I hope. We're in discussions with the current tenants and prospective new tenants to lease these farms or if the price is right, we may look at sell a couple of these farms too. We believe we have some very valuable farms.
So selling is an option for us. And now I'll give a quick update on some of the remaining tenancy issues that we continue to work on.
During the quarter, we executed lease agreements on certain farms and sold other farms that have previously been either vacant or direct operated by us.
So we currently have 5 farms that are vacant, 1 farm is in direct operation via a management agreement with an unrelated third party. I know some of the people in this business have their own way of doing it with captive. These are third parties, so we have some good people in there.
In addition, we're recognizing revenue from leases with 3 tenants who collectively lease 6 of our farms on a cash basis. It's usually done on an accrual basis, but we're going to do cash on those just to keep them current.
Regarding these farms, we're in discussion with various potential buyers or tenants to buy or lease these properties, and we hope to get these remaining issues resolved later this year. And if we're unable to come to an acceptable resolution, we may end up listing some of these farms for sale. A pretty good way of going about getting out of them is listing them for sale. Total year-over-year impact of our operations as a result of tenant issues, these properties will decrease in net operating income of about $236,000, and that will hit us in the fourth quarter. I'm going to stop here. That's just tasting, and I hope we get some good questions at the end. But Lewis is going to take over now as the CFO of the company. He works with the numbers every day.
So Lewis, go ahead.