The City’s fascination with farming

Everyone’s an expert on agriculture these days. Talk to anyone in the City: when they’re not boring you with how much copper wire it takes to build a satellite city outside Shanghai and what that means for mining shares, they’re telling you about soy bean yields in Brazil and the rising price of powdered milk. Fascination with food has been brought on by a sudden realisation in financial markets that there’s money to be made in farming. After several decades of stagnation, the prices of pretty much everything edible has started to soar. In Britain the price of wheat is up 90 per cent on last year and the price of barley up 100 per cent, while anyone who bothers to look at their supermarket receipts will have noted that milk, beef and sugar are ticking up in price too. The reasons behind this are now well known; the world’s population is growing steadily while the big Asian economies are producing a massive middle class with the disposable income to chuck a chicken in the pot pretty much whenever they fancy it.