Bice purchase of Agridime nearly complete
The Agridime website reported on Sept. 25, 2024, that the receivership has entered a purchase agreement with an investor group from North Dakota to purchase the assets of Agridime and American Grazed Beef.
The assets include the remaining frozen meat supply, the company’s equipment and nine parcels of land in Kansas and Illinois.
The final purchase price will be set at closing (due to ongoing meat sales, the inventory of meat may change) but is currently estimated at $15.7 million.
The Agridime report said that the purchaser intends to continue operating American Grazed Beef and has also agreed to pay 20 percent of any future profits to the receivership for a period of three years to benefit the investor victims.
The Court was allowing objections to the sale to be made by Oct. 2, 2024 and will hold a hearing to consider approving the sale on Oct. 7, 2024.
If the sale is approved, it is anticipated that the transaction will close shortly afterward.
The purchase agreement and notice of sale can be found online at https://www.agridime.com/information-on-the-agridime-receivership (Scroll to the bottom and look for the Sept. 25, 2024, entry.)
Wylie Bice, a Killdeer, North Dakota, rancher said if the purchase goes through, he will be the new owner of the company.
He hopes to start buying 3-4 loads of cattle per week, and will need calves of all sizes – from bawling calves to finished cattle.
He has been in conversation with a company about tapping into export markets including
Europe and Asia.
Currently online and retail sales are the biggest market for American Grazed Beef. Bice hopes to grow the wholesale market domestically and abroad.
He said the beef will be all natural and will be born, raised and processed in the United States.
“We want American beef all the way from North Dakota to Texas,” he said. “We want to sell good quality beef.”
Bice plans to continue processing beef at a plant in Texas. The company will also continue to offer pork and chicken for sale.
Bice said part of the agreement is for American Grazed Beef to pay back Agridime investors who did not recoup their investments when the Securities and Exchange Commission froze the company’s assets and charged the owners (Jed Wood and and Joshua Link) with operating a Ponzi scheme. He said investors will receive some payment when the company purchase goes through, and will continue to receive more for the next two years. He hopes investors eventually receive 70-80 percent of what they lost.
Agridime shared the following statement to Agridime investors:
“The sale of Agridime’s assets has been of central importance to the receivership, and with that complicated transaction now before the Court, we will turn to getting notices of the amounts owed to each investor emailed to each of you. We will start getting these emails out on October 1st, and due to the large number of investors and the personalized information we are sending, we anticipate the entire process to take three weeks. Thus, if you have NOT received a notice by October 22nd, please contact us. Otherwise, there will be instructions with the notice emailed to you on how to handle any response to the notice you receive. Thank you very much for your patience during the audit process and with the delay in preparing these notices.”
