Investing in your passion: Wealthy families add forests to their portfolios

The decline in arable land and rising global food demand, for example, are reasons to invest in farmland

Tom Crowder spent much of his two-year career in the NFL running away from men who weighed upwards of 300 pounds. These days? He worries about bears and snakes. As a senior vice president at Bank of America Corp., Crowder spends most days in the woods, from the evergreen forests of New England to the wetlands of the Carolinas, scouting US timberland assets for people with a net worth of at least $100 million and a minimum of $10 million to invest.

“Trees don’t move as fast as Pro Bowl linebackers,” Crowder says on a recent field trip to a