Australia

Australia's dairy industry is the new flavour of the month among foreign investors, with global pension funds, food companies and wealthy individuals turning their focus from New Zealand towards Victoria and Tasmania.

The chairman of the New Hope Group is a key Chinese partner in the Sino-Australia 100-Year Agricultural and Food Safety Partnership-- an initiative founded by mining billionaire Andrew Forrest

While Chinese investors, like Ms Qiao, are in Australia looking at farms, an Australian real estate company has headed to China to find buyers for Australian farming properties.

A new $3 billion fund jointly initiated by the Beijing Agricultural Investment Fund and Yuhu Agriculture Investment Pty Ltd. is planning to invest $3 billion capital in various projects in Australia.

Thousands of miles from pricey U.S. farmland, a Michigan pension fund is expanding its investments in Australian farms, betting on good returns from the comparatively cheaper assets and surging commodity prices.

Close 60 per cent of ­farmers in a major new survey still believe there should be less foreign direct investment in Australian farms.

A Scandanavian pension fund has poured $20 million into Australian dairy farms to help lift stagnant local milk production.

More than half the guest list for the inaugural Australian Dairy Farm Investment Forum in Melbourne next month are ­corporate or Chinese investors seeking to be matched with advisory groups to find dairy land investments.

US pension fund manager TIAA-CREF, under pressure to put cash to work after having raised $2bn for TIAA-CREF Global Agriculture, agreed to purchase 12,528 ha of farmland in Florida.

A US pension fund investor that flies under the radar has continued its spending spree on quality agricultural land in WA with the purchase of two farms in Grass Patch for about $9 million.

Russian agribusiness giant Prodimex is said to have bought 27% of Stockholm-listed farmland operator Agrokultura, which has operations in Ukraine and Russia.

A new survey reports that foreign ownership of Australian farmland grew by 4.7 million hectares in just two-and-a-half years.