The Australian rural industry is experiencing extraordinary challenges. Many farms require significant improvements if they are to achieve sustainable levels of profitability. Meanwhile farmers are getting older and young farmers are often discouraged from taking on the family business because of the high levels of capital required and the perceived risks involved.

Despite the challenges, we strongly believe highly productive farm operations can be a profitable business and fully sustainable over a long term and significant opportunities present themselves in the agricultural industry.

Australian agriculture is currently proving an attractive investment for sound reasons;

• Capital gain has returned between 6.5% and 8% pa over a 15-20 year period.
• Globally, Australia is seen as a safe place to invest with stable government and regulatory system and cheap agricultural land relative to many other similarly stable countries..
• Worldwide perception that soft commodities are going to come under more pressure due to factors such as population growth, developing countries increasing wealth, diversion of crops for bio-fuel and uncertainty about climate change and its affect on world food availability and security.

At a management level, Growth Farms sees real opportunities that can be seized;

• Large productivity gains can still be made on the majority of Australian farms. Our business can provide the operational and technical management expertise required to achieve these productivity gains.
• Economies of scale in terms of marketing of commodities and purchasing of inputs represent an opportunity that translates straight to the bottom line of profitability. Growth Farms is able to take advantage of many economies of scale beyond the reach of most landowners.
• The large variation in profitability between farms is illustrated below.

• The key message being the numbers above is that the majority of the variation between farm business performance is due to management rather than many of the other factors that may affect farm performance. All too often variation in performance is attributed to factors such as particular soils or rainfall patterns. We believe the difference between good managers and the rest is how they capitalise on the resources they have available to them. The potential to improve farm performance represents a very significant opportunity to all of those involved in farm businesses.
• Growth Farms has proven through track record to be an out performer in industry benchmarking.