Turning Corn And Soy Into College Cash

Why the University of Illinois endowment wants farms in its portfolio

- Janet Lorin

Early in Ellen Ellison’s tenure as chief investment officer for the University of Illinois Foundation, she and some staff toured a university-owned farm in Monticello, 30 miles west of the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. Ellison was impressed by the complexity of a GPS-outfitted planting machine, which was able to track the variety of seeds used, measure their depth in the soil, and record the exact number of them planted per acre.

Ellison is aiming to make farmland about 10 percent of the $1.8 billion endowment port folio she oversees. Separately the university manages an additional $800 million, which also includes farms. That might seem like an obvious play for a big Midwestern school—similar to the University of Texas System’s getting money from oil. According to campus lore in Urbana, the undergraduate library was built underground in part to avoid casting a shadow on an historic experimental cornfield. But few universities are committed to building up their ag holdings the way Illinois is. For a public university in a state with budget woes, “you’re always looking for new and creative ways to skin a cat,” Ellison says. “I feel my conduit is agriculture.”