Thursday, April 12, 2012

Want to Make a Fortune? Become a Farmer

Jim Rogers was recently interviewed by Greg Mellinger, CEO of HighQuest Partners, on investing in agriculture.

"The most promising payback in agriculture is to become a farmer," said Rogers, who noted huge return opportunities in farming for many reasons, but also simply because we need more food to feed the world. "Farming can once again be one of the great areas of the world economy as economies of scale come into play, higher prices come into play, and technology comes into play. Few are rushing out to buy a farm yet; but it will come."

Rogers spoke of long periods when financial types were in charge, followed by long periods when producers of real goods were in charge, predicting that the time was coming when students of farming would reach levels of those achieving MBAs. "Someday it's going to be that America will be producing tens of thousands of agriculture graduates, as we did once upon a time, and there are not going to be many MBAs," said Rogers. "When the huge secular changes come, nobody can conceive of how high prices can go and will go and returns will go."

5 comments:

  1. Really? When I think of farmer, I can't help but think of the movie "Seven Samurai", where the farmer is always exploited. Poor guys.

    Any historical case of farmers being "in charge"? Or is it just the land owners who are "in charge"?

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  2. Broken link, Bob.

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  3. I have tremendous respect for Jim Rogers, but... it's not that easy to just become a farmer. Especially for a youngsters with very little or no money. Sure, one could become a farmer in a sense that he/she is the person who plants, harvests, etc it all. But this person will not be the owner of the farm. And owners are the one who will be making big bucks. And it is very-very difficult to just start a farm. There are quotas, government licenses, etc which are very difficult to get. Most of the quotas are already in the hands of big farmers, which means I should somehow try to get (that is, buy) them from these big players. But with what money? And what makes Rogers think they would sell them?

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  4. Rogers has been singing this song for years... he will eventually be right, but man is it taking long! He wrote Hot Commodities in 2004...

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  5. Not likely.Do you guys follow the technology in farming?A lot less people are needed as the equipment gets bigger and more efficient.

    I'm in the middle of farm country here (Iowa) and the amount of small farmers decrease every year as the number of large farmers increase.It only takes a couple guys to farm 3000 acres anymore,and that's a lot faster and easier than a few years back.

    Farm ground around here is around 13K an acre-good luck bidding on it as there are plenty with money that will outbid you.

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