The new Spanish agricultural sector faces a financing problem. While olive groves, almonds, and pistachios lead the transformation of the farming sector and are expanding in area year after year, their long maturation periods make traditional credit hard to access. The Fellow Funders report on financing for Spanish agriculture in 2026 concludes that this gap is fostering the growth of new participatory financing models regulated by the CNMV.
The contrast is particularly striking: while Spain’s gross value added (GVA) in agriculture grew by 3.9% in 2024, the entire EU-27 posted a 2.9% decline, according to data from the Cajamar-IVIE Observatory. Spanish agriculture is gaining weight in the economy, but it continues to struggle to finance investments with long maturation horizons.
The magnitude of the problem is also reflected on a European scale. The European Investment Bank, through its fi-compass initiative, estimates an annual financing shortfall for agriculture of between €19.8 billion and €46.6 billion, a gap that affects especially holdings requiring substantial investments and long payback periods, such as olive groves, almonds, or pistachios.
This prominence is also evident in organic farming. According to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, nuts occupy 310,096 hectares of organic land —the largest expanse by crop type— followed by olives, with 292,868 hectares, and cereals, with 261,924 hectares.
Public funding is not enough
Although Spain has a Plan of Measures to Improve Financing for the Agricultural Sector and the ICO-MAPA-SAECA line, the public subsidy does not cover the portion of loans exceeding €100,000, which limits access to financing for many mid-sized farms. CAP subsidies, moreover, provide income support rather than an investment instrument.
«Regulated equity crowdfunding fits with real-asset agriculture in a way that no other instrument can: it fractions the ticket so hundreds of investors enter where previously only a bank or fund did, accepts as collateral land, the harvest, or machinery, and tolerates the long tenures demanded by crops like olive or almond trees. At Fellow Funders we have channeled €7 million across 8 agro rounds, and we are clear: this is not a temporary alternative, it’s the financing infrastructure that the Spanish countryside has been missing»,
explains Gonzalo Albero, Chief Executive Officer of Fellow Funders.
The report illustrates this evolution with the case of a Mancha region agricultural promoter who, over the last eight years, has raised nearly €3 million from 199 investors to develop more than forty hectares of olive, almond, and pistachio groves without resorting to traditional bank financing. The latest operation, Alboris Sextus, includes five annual liquidity windows between 2031 and 2035, in which the investor may divest up to 10% of their shares at a known price, with the promoter’s obligation to buy back. For those who stay in the project, the structure contemplates a minimum dividend from 2029 and increasing participation in cash flow beginning in 2032.
The data support this evolution. Regulated crowdfunding under the CNMV reached in 2025 a record €761.6 million mobilized, up 45.8% from the previous year. Within this growth, crowdlending, a modality especially suited to agricultural projects backed by assets such as land or the harvest, quintupled its volume.
«The embedded buyback in agribusiness rounds, and specifically with Alboris Mancha, marks a turning point in our business. Today we structure operations from the outset with mechanisms that guarantee the buyback of participations with returns above market and with optional tenors for the investor. In the coming years we will see more deals structured this way. This is here to stay,” concludes Albero.
