GreenWorld BVI's  Instablog

While much of the interest in farmland as an investment has been in UK, European or American farmland, there are also some excellent opportunities in Australia. First consider an overview of the appreciation of Australian farmland:

(click to enlarge)

Next, consider this article on how agriculture is the next big commodities play in Australia.

Finally, consider this article we published some time back entitled Arable Farmland and the Case for Agriculture, published on Seeking Alpha. As noted, China is a particular victim of this trend, and as a result, will have to import increasingly large quantities of foodstuffs such as wheat. Australia is well placed to meet this demand, and indeed, wheat exports from Australia are poised to increase 13pc in 2013, and we'd wager that a lot of this is going to China. Yes, Australian agriculture and farmland may be a backdoor China Play!

As we discussed in a number of previous posts our farmland investment blog- here and here - institutional interest in farmland continues to grow. The asset class is still pretty much new territory for institutional investors as their is only about US$30 million of farmland investments to date by institutional investors.

Now, we see another article come out about this trend. In an article entitled "Pension funds join forces to invest in farmland", Reuters notes that a number of large pension funds are coming together to jointly invest in farmland projects. TIAA-CREF, European pension funds and the British Columbia Investment Corporation are all investing in farmland.

This means that as more institutional investment goes into farmland, smaller investors who have invested in the asset class will benefit from the inevitable price appreciation. Institutional investors are not always right, but the sheer amount of money they possess can certainly move markets, and smaller investors would be wise to examine the advantages of investing in farmland.

We recently came across a rather interesting post in an online forum. The author was interested in investing in timber, and made the very good point that owning a timber stock and ETF was not the same as owning timber as a direct investment. The author noted, however, that owning forestry directly was very difficult to achieve if one was not a large institutional investor.

Luckily, due to recent developments, one does not need to be a large institution to invest in forestry directly. We offer a number of options for forestry investment in tropical timber that have low minimums, and are purely passive investments where the project manager handles everything from the planting to the harvesting to the sale of the product, in exchange for a share of the income. Feel free to visit us at greenworldbvi.com to learn more.