TIAA-CREF’s Westchester-Nuveen increases spend on Australian farmland to $1.82 billion

One of Australia’s biggest foreign investors has increased the size of its local farming operations to almost one million acres of cropping land worth $1.82 billion.

TIAA-CREF is one of the biggest investors in Australian farmland.

An American investment fund has increased the size of its Australian farming operations to almost one million acres of cropping land worth $1.82 billion, new figures show.

In its annual farmland report released this week, Westchester-Nuveen – the operating entity of the New York-based teacher superannuation giant TIAA-CREF – said its Australian farming operations had grown to 383,078 hectares (946,607 acres) worth $US1.4 billion ($A1.82 billion) in the 12 months to December 2020.

That represents an increase from 358,065 hectares worth $US1.15 billion ($A1.66 billion) a year earlier.

The report showed TIAA-CREF’s biggest footprint was in Western Australia, where landholdings increased to 186,104 hectares in 2020 (up from 159,698 hectares in 2019), followed by NSW with 148,410 hectares (down from 150,314 hectares), Queensland 41,438 hectares (up from 40,927 hectares) and Victoria 7125 hectares (unchanged).

TIAA-CREF – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America and College Retirement Equities Fund – is the biggest investor in farmland globally. According to the report, at the end of last year it had 943,000 hectares of farmland worth $US8 billion under management. Row crops accounted for 77.6 per cent of the business, followed by sugarcane (18.7 per cent), horticulture (2.6 per cent) and wine grapes (1.1 per cent).

In addition to Australia, TIAA-CREF has operations in Brazil (350,465 hectares worth US$1.53 billion), the US (136,218 hectares worth US$4.23 billion), Poland (39,300 hectares worth US$510 million), Romania (31,475 hectares worth US$230 million), Chile (2265 hectares worth US$510 million) and New Zealand (274 hectares worth US$200 million).

Westchester chief executive Martin Davies said the COVID-19 pandemic had “highlighted the importance of agriculture to society and the critical need to sustain the supply of food to an ever-growing population”.

“The crux of this challenge is that escalating food demand must be met while working from a declining land resource base and a more sensitive approach to resource use,” Mr Davies wrote in the report. “This means that the world must achieve stable supply-demand dynamics for agricultural production for it to be sustainable over the long term.

“Farmland is at the centre of this structural and global trend.”

TIAA-CREF is the third-biggest investor in Australian farmland, following Canada’s PSP Investments which has more than $4 billion in investments and Macquarie Bank’s various agricultural funds valued at north of $3 billion.

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