May 4, 2012

BILL KIERNAN Director, GAI Research & Insight

My team and I spent the early part of the week gathering and analyzing the latest news regarding the agriculture sector and agricultural investing for “Global AgDevelopments,Volume 5,” which was emailed to subscribers and members of the www.GlobalAgInvesting.com community on Thursday. 

Over time, I have subscribed to many email news services which send email alerts with links to stories on specific subject matter.  By and large, most of these were of little value.  They provided only links to news stories, have no value-added analysis, and were often filled with multiple stories that did not seem to have much relevance to their intended topic.  After a few issues of these types of news alerts, I would tire of wasting my time and either unsubscribe or consign them to my “Deleted Items” folder unopened.  In the process of developing Global AgDevelopments, my team and I decided that we wanted to offer something much better… 

Each issue of Global AgDevelopments includes links to stories which are carefully screened to include only those most useful to members of the investment community, agriculture industry professionals, and service providers in the space.  But that’s not all.  In each issue we endeavor to include a mix of media, including video as well as print.  We then go the extra mile and provide you with a concise summary of the article as well as expanded analysis of the story’s topic.  Not only that, but we provide you with some fun facts in each issue in our “Agriculture Trivia” section.

Global AgDevelopments, Volume 5 included news stories and analysis of the following:

• A China-based investment company’s purchase of 15,000 hectares of farmland in Western Australia
• Eighteen publicly-traded companies with large farmland holdings that provide an investor to farmland fundamentals without having to purchase a large farmland portfolio
• Aquila Capital’s planned closure of two $125 million global agriculture funds focused on dairy, livestock and arable land respectively in Eastern Europe, Australia, and with a possible expansion in Uruguay
• A joint Purdue and Stanford study on how climate change and biofuel mandates may double the volatility of corn prices in next 30 years
• A study predicting that India’s wine market will likely grow by 25% per year through 2020.
• The world’s largest dairy exporter, plans to spend US$82 million to develop a large-scale direct farming operation in Hebei Province in China
• New Zealand’s government has approved the sale of 16 dairy farms totaling 20,000 acres to a Chinese investment firm for US $163 million.
• The launch of a new exchange-traded commodities index fund
• The launch of a new Australia and New Zealand-focused investment fund

Some examples of past Global AgDevelopments Trivia include:

• Cloning has been around a long time in agriculture. Did you know that every single navel orange tree on earth is an exact genetic copy of a single bud mutation which occurred in 1820 on a sour orange tree located in the garden of a monastery in Bahia, Brazil?  This mutation was discovered by a Presbyterian Missionary, who took a cutting from the offending branch and propagated it into a grove of trees.  The USDA obtained cuttings of these new trees in 1872, and in 1873 sent these cuttings to farmer Eliza Tibbets of Riverside California, kicking off the US navel orange industry.  Brazil is currently the largest producer of orange juice in the world, and California is the leading grower of fresh oranges in the U.S.
• Did you know that the word cranberry descends from the word “craneberry”?  Original European settlers of the Eastern US saw a similarity between the cranberry blossom and the head and neck of the crane.  The cranberry, along with the blueberry and the Concord grape are the only three fruits native to North America.  The cranberry grows on trailing vines that form a thick mat on the surface of the beds in which they are cultivated.  Today, cranberries are grown on about 53,000 acres world-wide in the US, Canada, and Chile, and the farm-gate value of production exceeds US $400 million annually.
• Did you know the closest relative of the almond is the peach?  Next time you are eating a peach, crack open the pit, and inside is a seed that looks remarkably like an almond. Just don’t eat that peach seed though; it contains prussic acid, or cyanide. Almonds come in two varieties, sweet and bitter.  Sweet almonds are cultivated for human consumption, while bitter almonds contain prussic acid like the peach seed and are potentially fatal if eaten in significant quantities. The fruit of the almond is not a true nut, but a drupe, consisting of an outer hull and a hard shell with the seed ("nut") inside. Shelling almonds refers to removing the shell to reveal the seed.  Almonds are grown around the world in Mediterranean climates, and the United States (California) is the largest producer of almonds in the world, producing 85.9% of the world crop in 2011.   California produces approximately 1.7 billion pounds of the nut annually from 750 thousand bearing acres.

We believe that Global AgDevelopments is a great product, and we hope you do also.  If you are not currently subscribed, please contact me at bkiernan@globalaginvesting.comand I will see that you receive the very next issue.