Capitalising the farm family entrepreneur: negotiating private equity partnerships in Australia

ABSTRACT

Research on the financialisation of land and agribusiness has highlighted major shifts in agri-food systems globally. Yet these accounts tend to focus on the activities of financial actors, and few take seriously the role of farmers in negotiating investments in land and agribusiness. Farmers in the global North may be well placed to benefit from partnerships with financial investors, although little is known about the way that such partnerships are formed. Australian studies of farmer agency have been productive in examining farm family entrepreneurs and globally engaged farmers who work beyond the farm gate to organise supply chains. This paper adds to these studies by providing insights about a capitalising farm family entrepreneur, who successfully negotiated and entered into a direct equity partnership with a large foreign pension fund. Several observations are significant: the exceptional skill, time and expense required to negotiate these partnerships; the role of consultants and non-human actors in structuring them; and the spatially- and temporally divergent farm development practices that are enabled by a shift from debt to equity financing. These observations are indicative of a new adaptive strategy of family farmers to shifting financial landscapes and of emergent family, corporate, and financial farm hybridity.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalisation
• farm family entrepreneurs
• financialisation
• investment
• pension fund
• private equity
• Australia

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the people who generously participated in this research, whose wealth of experience informed this article. I would also like to thank Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Lawrence and Dr Kiah Smith for their helpful comments on drafts of this article, as well as two anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful suggestions for the revision of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alexandra (Zannie) Langford is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Queensland, researching how local actors negotiate financial investments into land and agribusiness in Northern Australia. Her research interests focus on agrifood systems, rural development and indigenous land use in Australia and Vanuatu.

ORCID

Alexandra Langford http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3049-1579

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Discovery Project 160101318, the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, and the University of Queensland, School of Social Science Fieldwork Grant.