Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/287905 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Agrarian Change [ISSN:] 1471-0366 [Volume:] 23 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] Wiley [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 433-441
Publisher: 
Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
Two recently published books—Fairbairn's Fields of Gold and Ouma's Farming as a Financial Asset—now provide the first extensive investigations into finance's engagement with farmland. Both books set out to understand finance's growing interest in farmland from the perspective of the financial actors involved, and inquire how, why, and with what kind of challenges ‘finance has been going farming.’ This review essay discusses the two books in the context of the ‘land rush’ literature. It outlines how they contribute to an advanced understanding of the financialization of farmland in three ways, by (i) embedding finance‐farmland intersections historically; (ii) scrutinizing the role of the state within financial farmland investments; and (iii) exploring the hurdles involved in ‘marrying’ finance with farmland. I then critically reflect on the areas that have not been covered by the authors. Critical agrarian studies need to investigate how financialization intersects with the digitization of agriculture, examine life expectancies and afterlives of financialized farms, further ground financial investment in concrete rural spaces, and explore individual motivations and belief systems of its proponents more seriously.
Subjects: 
farmland
financial investment
financialization
land rush
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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