Suddenly, farming is sexy — for investors, anyway. Pergam Finance, a Paris-based hedge fund with $1 billion (£511 million) in assets, is about to double the size of Campos Orientales, a fund that buys farms in Argentina and Uruguay, with a $60 million to $80 million fundraising.

Deborah Rockabrand, of Pergam, said that she had a list of wealthy investors — “a lot of individuals disillusioned with traditional financial assets”.

The rich are scouring neglected and fringe markets for signs of hidden value as they pull their cash out of shares and bonds. Many funds are looking at agriculture, such as Blackrock, the hedge fund that has merged with Merrill Lynch, which has launched a £100 million vehicle.

Most of Blackrock’s fund will be in agricultural commodity futures, such as wheat, but a significant slice will be devoted to buying farms.

Galtere, an American hedge fund, is buying farmland in the United States. In Britain Braemar, an AIM-listed property company, is seeking private investors’ backing for a £20 million agricultural land fund.

This is not a passing craze, according to Christopher Wyke, commodities product manager at Schroders. “We are in the early stages of an extended bull market [for agricultural commodities].”

He expects it to last 15 to 20 years, after the preceding 25-year bear market, during which affluent Europeans and Americans learnt to take food for granted. “The problem is that it is difficult to invest in agriculture. There are very few agricultural producers that are quoted.”

The quoted food processors and manufacturers are price-takers, which suffer from the rise in the cost of food. For Braemar, the solution is to buy the soil.

British farmland is cheap by Western European standards and Marc Duschenes, Braemar’s chief executive, is hoping that the surge in grain prices after years of stagnation will push some hard-pressed farming families to sell land.

“We are speculating that commodity prices will feed through into higher land prices,” he said.

According to Ms Rockabrand: “Two separate stories have created two zones of demand for agriculture — population growth and changes in diet.”

There are more affluent people in Asia who eat meat, which creates more demand for cattle and in turn more demand for grain to feed the cattle.

Pergam’s fund is buying up old cattle ranches in South America and turning over half of the land to crops.

Land is more scarce and the price of wheat has almost tripled over the past two years.

A combination of drought in Australia, a fall in US stocks to near-40-year lows and panic buying by developing countries anxious to avoid shortages has pushed wheat to record levels.

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