The latest boom for investors isn’t high-tech or Big Pharma. According to Wally Brockhoff of Lathrop & Gage, investment firms are going to the cows or, more specifically, farmland. He reports that hedge funds currently have $14 billion invested in agricultural land across the world.
“In response to growing demand and increasing food prices, hedge funds have been buying up as much farmland as possible, hoping to profit from these economic conditions,” he says. To make the fertilizer fertile, some bankers and investors have come up with a mechanism in which they combine both the crops and the actual land into an entity or new asset class, available to the average investor, explains Brockhoff. He says two of these real estate investment trusts are already trading on Nasdaq, and others are looking to go public as well.
