The report details corporate land investments in the Mississippi Delta region, and ways that the growth of speculative farmland ownership exacerbates barriers that farmers face accessing and maintaining land in the region.
WSIB has allocated a total of $400 million into a separate account with UBS Farmland Investors and a Homestead Capital USA Farmland Fund IV.
The pension fund is reducing its allocation to real assets from 22% to 17% as it moves its agriculture allocation to zero.
As institutional investors continue to seek “pockets of calm” amid the turmoil, farmland’s resilience during the global financial crisis and the pandemic’s immediate aftermath is likely to be top of mind.
New Zealand dairy giant will launch a fund that will pool capital from investors such as sovereign wealth funds and pension funds to invest in land and fixtures of dairy farms through a farm-owning entity.
Gobiernos y empresas han acaparado en los países en desarrollo un área mayor que México
UBS Global Asset Management has established an Australia and New Zealand farmland investment advisory service to meet the growing institutional demand for assets, particularly from Asia.
Farmland has become the darling of alternative investing, sending hedge funds and wealthy investors into bidding wars for plots of land once deemed ordinary. And it is not just big money getting in on the game. From Stockholm to Chicago to Vancouver, ordinary investor money is pouring into fields around the world.
Wisconsin state legislators have blocked an effort by Gov. Scott Walker to lift the state's long-time limits on foreign ownership of farmland.
In November, an investment unit of the big Swiss bank UBS bought 9,800 acres of Wisconsin farmland for $68 million
"The stock market's pretty wild. The bond market's nothing. CDs are zero," said Steve Runyan, an agricultural real estate appraiser, "and so you have a tremendous amount of money in pension funds and investment funds of some kind that need some kind of return." Some of his clients for California farmland are international companies looking at global population trends.
Pension funds and other corporate owners have spent only a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars they could invest in farmland, but they are definitely kicking the tires on potential purchases.
