Five Entrepreneurial Lessons I Learned Growing Up On A Farm
“The ultimate goal of the farm is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”—Masanobu Fukuoka On July 31, 1951, I was born on a farm in a faraway place called New Zealand. Today I run a Real Estate business in the heart of South America called “Gateway to South America“. For many years, I ran away from my farm-life upbringing because I thought it had no place in this business, but over time, I’ve come to embrace some of my farm-boy ways to a competitive…
Food Security report points out the Farming needs for a ‘sustainable intensification’
The quest to feed the world’s rapidly growing population over the next 40 years needs a front loaded approach to funding agricultural research, according to a report on food security released recently. New science and technologies are among the tools needed to achieve a huge ‘sustainable intensification’ of agriculture aimed at feeding the nine billion people expected to inhabit the planet by 2050, says ‘The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability’,…
New Tool to Help Farmers Mitigate and Adapt to Climate Change
The Rainforest Alliance and the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) unveiled the new Climate Module: Criteria for the Mitigation of and Adaptation to Climate Change, developed in collaboration with allies at Guatemala’s Inter-American Foundation for Tropical Research (FIIT, for its name in Spanish); SalvaNATURA, a Salvadoran conservation organization; the National Coffee Association, Anacafé; the Efico Foundation; the Universidad del Valle (the Guatemalan research institution) and with financial support…
Agriculture investments growing rapidly and expecting to double
Worldwide investors are looking at South America for growing more feed grains, corn and soybeans, as rising global meat consumption propels prices, said Chris Erickson, managing director of Boston-based farm consultancy HighQuest. “What we are seeing right now is a lot of interest from institutional investors, private capital, pensions and endowment foundations to invest in real assets,” he told on an industry seminar in Singapore. Inflows of private capital in agriculture worldwide are expected…
Investment funds around the world seeking farmland in response to food price hikes
For decades, the world was often swimming in surplus food because farmers were so productive. But rising demand has caught up, and reserves have become so tight that global food markets are vulnerable to even minor shocks. Many analysts say that higher, more volatile prices may be here to stay. The new dynamic reflects in part the rising demand for commodities in developing countries such as China, India and Russia. By 2050, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization projects that world food production will…
Investment Funds are scrambling to build up rural expertise in response to rocketing investor demand to buy entire farms
Investment funds worldwide have put an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion in agriculture globally, and interest is also growing from ultra-rich investors and pension funds, which see farmland as tangible, strategic assets. But Rich Gammill, managing director of the Cargill unit Black River Asset Management, which manages $6 billion including in food and agriculture, said farmland investments can be tricky. “It seems simple, but agriculture is anything but. There is a global supply chain and lots of…
