Touch the Soil News #2024 (photo Cattle and horses in stockyards, Australia) (Cgoodwin, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)
Australian Financial Review brings the story of one of the world’s largest land purchases. The buyers are represented by one of Canada’s largest fund managers on behalf of a group of institutional investors. The important thing to note here is that it is not farmer’s that are buying the land. Institutional investors are recognizing the world is faced with less than abundant farmland and they are putting dollars out there betting it will get more valuable. This means that whoever has agricultural assets – land, water, and access – might think twice before selling and what might be done with what they have.
The investor group (Alberta Investment Management Corporation) comes from Canada and the cattle ranch they are buying is in Australia. Coming in at almost 7.4 million acres (much of it is pasture) this equates to a farm that is 231 miles long and 50 miles wide. The selling price is $300 million. You can read the full story here:
