Australia's biggest listed rural property play, Rural Funds Group, is eyeing up potential opportunities in aquaculture and wheat after delivering another strong six months of trading across its $552 million portfolio of almond and macadamia orchards, vineyards, poultry farms, cattle and cotton.
Rural Funds, the top performing A-REIT in FY16, more than doubled its adjusted funds from operations to $12.6 million for the December half-year after boosting its diversification play with its first cotton and cattle farm acquisitions.
Investors, which now include a much deeper institutional base as global sentiment has swung back in favour of agribusiness, were rewarded with distributions rising 8 per cent to 4.82¢ per unit.
Fund manager Rural Funds Management reaffirmed FY17 guidance of 9.64¢ per unit and adjusted funds from operations of $12.42 per unit, increases of 8 and 34 per cent respectively on FY16. The company forecast a further 4 per cent uplift in distributions in FY18.
Managing director David Bryant said the fund was delivering on its strategy of building a diversified portfolio – by climate and rural sector – with investment now spread across six sectors.
Substantial sector
"We have no [current] plans to look beyond these sectors. They are very large and enable substantial expansion," Mr Bryant said. "Cotton, cattle and almonds are three sectors that enable us to do good size transactions and we want to do more."
But he said the trust was "doing work on other sectors" and researching where it can find those with favourable economics.
"Aquaculture [fish and seafood] produces more protein by weight and value than the global beef industry. It's a very substantial sector so we are doing some work on that," Mr Bryant said.
He added that Western Australia's wheat belt was attractive to the climatic diversification objectives of the fund.
"It has very low correlation to where a lot of our assets are in Murray Darling Basin. The scale and cost of production is really world competitive. It's an industry we would take a further look at," he said.
Macadamia prices high
Almond orchards, which make up more than half of RFF's portfolio by value, will receive the bulk of its $138 million development capital expenditure over the next three years.
By 2020, Rural Funds will own the country's biggest almond orchard when it completes development of the 2500-hectare Kerarbury orchard at Darlington Point in the NSW Riverina for Singapore producer Olam.
Mr Bryant tipped macadamia nuts as a future strong performer. "Macadamia prices are very high, so much so that my dentist was complaining about them," he said. "We're in a phase where supply is inadequate compared with demand, so planting new orchards would not be ill-advised."
