how far is the us from food shortages or riots, page-15

I bemoan the lack of investment in agriculture because it has occurred for 40 years and it is in part why we have bottlenecks appearing all throughout the food production supply chain. Fertilizer and herbicide shortages, water shortages through inefficient irrigation infrastructure, shortages of farm machinery (12 months to wait for a new tractor now), lack of trucking capacity, inefficient rail services, shortages of grain storage capacity. It all adds to the cost of food my friend which means underinvestment has now turned nastily inflationary.

By buying stock in agricultural input suppliers, you effectively help capitalise those input producers and that will invariably result in increased supply of these inputs eg herbicides and fertilizer, placing downward pressure on prices and allowing farmers to increase usage. For example Nufarm recently raised capital to increase its phenoxy herbicide capacity globally, Incitec recently moved on Dyno Nobel to ramp up nitrogen fertilizer producing capacity. If this capacity is not delivered to the marketplace in this environment, the supply of those inputs become tenuous and the capacity to produce food is detrimentally affected.

By buying stock in agricultural infrastructure projects (eg bulk handlers [ABB and GNC] and transporters) you help to increase the efficiency of handling and transporting grain to market which helps reduce the costs of handling grain. You need large economies of scale for such bulky commodities as grain and that type of investment needs to come from large pools of money. Farmers don't have the equity to fund this type of capacity.

The farms are privately owned for the most part but food production is as much about fertilizer, herbicides, diesel, water, infrastructure as it is about the farm.