New Forests: Ploughing a new furrow in agriculture

Florence Chong speaks to head of New Agriculture Bruce King.

New Forests, founded in 2005, is the third-largest forestry investment manager, but in recent years has been expanding into agriculture and today has more than €900m in assets under management in the sector.

The firm has managed agriculture for clients like Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) for several years, but in 2022 it relaunched the business as New Agriculture.

Arguably, agriculture is where most substantial change can be achieved, because it remains the dominant land use. In Australia, the total area of land under primary production is nearly 446m hectares – 58% of the Australian land mass. Excluding grazing of natural vegetation, this area reduces to approximately 101m hectares (13%). By comparison, the plantation forestry sector (excluding native vegetation) represents approximately 1.7m hectares, just 0.2%.

These figures drive the philosophy behind a decision by the successful Sydney-based New Forests to establish New Agriculture, a new plank of its fund management platform, initially focused on Australia and New Zealand.

Today, New Agriculture manages agricultural land equivalent to the size of a small European country. Along with investment partner AIMCo, New Agriculture acquired what was known as the Kimberley Cattle Portfolio from a Chinese tycoon in late 2023 for A$300m (€181m). The transaction ceded control of 2.9m hectares of mainly cattle grazing land in northern Western Australia to New Agriculture.

To be able to own and manage such a large parcel of landscape does give us an ability to play an outsized role in improving the land with regenerative agriculture,”

says Bruce King, head of New Agriculture.

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