Australia

One of the country’s biggest milk producers – backed by the Rich Lister Perich family and China’s New Hope Group – has sold one of its major farms in Victoria’s north for close to $55 million.

KKR, a leading global investment firm, and Aware Super, a leading Australian super fund, announced the signing of definitive agreements under which funds managed by KKR will acquire ProTen Pty Limited (“ProTen”), one of the largest agricultural infrastructure businesses in Australia.

Duxton Capital is the agriculture, wine and pubs empire founded by former Deutsche Asset Management heavyweight Ed Peter and backed by prominent investors including the billionaire Oatley family, hedge fund manager Richard Magides and Phil King’s Regal Partners.

Australian farmers aren’t the only ones cheering the rocketing price of almonds and beef from the simmering trade tensions between the US and China – a cohort of fund managers is also in the money.

One of Hong Kong’s wealthiest tycoons, Li Ka-Shing, whose interests include energy and agricultural investments in this country, has forged into the carbon market, acquiring a vast Western Australian landholding earmarked for a ‘regenerative agriculture’ project.

Macquarie shopped ProTen as a $1 billion-plus infrastructure investment given its sprawling property portfolio – 62 broiler farms nationally and 720 poultry sheds, supplying to clients like Inghams.

Corporate-backed farming groups from North America and the UK have emerged as key players in the nation’s farmland market in the past year.

With 6000 hectares, the land comprises conservation areas, a plywood mill, and a voluntary carbon project focused on plantation afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation issuing carbon credits

The bigger question—one Tasmania must answer soon—is how much of its food-bowl can be outsourced to balance sheets before community cohesion snaps.

The investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has bought a fourth major Aussie cropping aggregation.

A venture backed by Canada’s PSP Investments has bought out its co-investors in the Kooba aggregation in New South Wales, which has 30,000 hectares of cotton, crops and livestock and 1,400 hectares of almond orchards.

New Agriculture manages the Lawson Grains portfolio on behalf of its investor, Canadian pension fund Alberta Investment Management Corporation, or AIMCo.