The Indonesian government may be in the market for an even larger slice of Australian land than the 1.5 million hectares it has proposed.

Duxton Asset Management has bought more than 800 hectares of Australian fruit orchards for a discount of more than 50 per cent from receivers of failed managed investment scheme Rewards Group and listed land owner Ark Fund.

China would invest billions of dollars to transform vast tracts of undeveloped land in northern Australia for farming, under a plan confirmed yesterday by the federal government.

Farmers have urged the state government to establish a register that would list Victorian farms that have been bought by foreign owners. The call comes as concerns grow over the level of foreign ownership of Australian farms and over the control of productive food resources.

UAE food processing and poultry group Iffco has justifiably ruffled some feathers in Australia. Earlier this year, Iffco acquired a 14.99 per cent stake in Australian Agricultural Company (AAC) from Futuris Corporation for AU$64.7 million (Dh171.6m). AAC is the largest beef cattle company in Australia, running around 500,000 beef cattle on 21 cattle stations comprising 8.2 million hectares.

A conference for fund managers tied to agriculture held annually in Sydney by Austock, an Australian broker, attracted a few dozen contrarian souls three years ago. This year’s event, which began on March 16th, had to be restricted to several hundred ticket-holders, with many others turned away.

The Treasurer said the size and location of the properties means selling them to a foreign buyer would be "contrary to the national interest", and the deal cannot go ahead.

A US institutional investor has awarded a US$50m mandate to Australian sustainable farmland manager Kilter Rural to invest in agriculture and water assets.

Qantas Super plans to generate a higher proportion of returns from the agricultural sector after committing $200 million to the development of high-yielding horticultural crops on properties managed by farmland investor goFARM.

Global agricultural investor Nuveen Natural Capital has joined a growing pool of institutional fund managers targeting Australia’s burgeoning macadamia sector, after buying one of the country’s largest orchards

Chinese agribusiness giant, New Hope Group, has moved to buy itself a comfortable majority share of the big Australian Fresh Milk Holdings dairy farming business.

Australian farmland manager Gunn Agri Partners has acquired 6,000 hectares of land for its Transforming Farming Platform, which is backed by the Dutch asset manager Kempen.

Giant South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group is looking to make an exit from the Warragundi aggregation in Australia, just over a year after taking control of the largest acreages in NSW’s Mudgee region.

A company backed by one of South Africa’s richest men is setting itself up to be a major player in the Northern Territory’s beef sector after paying $70 million for two major cattle stations, Tanumbirini and Forrest Hill.

Rifa Salutary first invested in Australian agriculture in 2014 and now has 14 properties in western Victoria and northern NSW, with a land area totaling around 44000 hectares.

The Saudi Agricultural Livestock Investment Company has emerged as the likely buyer of Australia’s biggest single parcel of broadacre farming land, based in the Wheatbelt.

The Beidahuang Group is rumoured to have leased out the majority of its 85,000 ha of WA farmland purchased or leased in a $200 million spending spree five years ago

Debt-burdened Glencore has entered early discussions with a number of sovereign wealth funds and commodities traders as it moves to offload the more than 30,000ha of cropping land across NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

One of Canada's largest pension funds, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, has made its first rural land purchase in Australia through central Queensland's Hewitt Cattle Company.

Black River Asset Management, a subsidiary of Cargill, one of the world's biggest food producers, has bought four grain-producing farms in the Darling Downs farming region between Dalby and Chinchilla.

A formal complaint filed to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) against Australian ANZ Bank. The complaint was lodged on behalf of 681 families who were forcibly displaced.

"The institutional ‘herd’ will eventually find agricultural investment,' delegates told at the Global AgInvesting Conference in New York.

Indonesia's announcement yesterday that it plans to buy a million hectares of Australian agricultural land to raise beef cattle is the clearest signal yet that it wants to lower its dependence on the current live export system.

Capital Alternatives, which offers investments ranging from holdings in African agriculture to pop memorabilia, claims it can generate returns of more than 20% over five years on West Australian wheat farms.

Hong Kong-listed Chevalier Group is set to emerge as a major supplier of fresh produce to Woolworths and Coles by acquiring a significant share of a leading Australian fruit and vegetable wholesaler and grower.

Controversial foreign investment in Australian farming land is here to stay and is vitally important to the future of food security, the federal government says.

There are unconfirmed reports that former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke is representing a Shanghai-based company wanting to farm all 15,000 hectares of the land being developed as part of the Ord irrigation project in Western Australia.

Corporate control of Australia’s farmland is beginning to ruffle feathers among some of the country’s primary producers.


Corporate Chinese interest in Australian rural land assets is gaining momentum and there are several players on the hunt across a wide spectrum of ­sectors: sugarcane, cotton, wool, tomatoes and grapes for wine.

China's Cofco Corporation has acquired an equity stake in Australian sugar producer Tully Sugar and is said to be pursuing a take-over.