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Whilst Argentina has a very low level of foreign ownership at around 5%, Australia has been promoting foreign ownership for decades to provide the capital required for a very capital-intensive industry. The question is who their buyers are.
Who owns Australia’s large farms? Meet the biggest investors
Australia’s farmland is increasingly controlled by a mix of long-established pastoral families, domestic agribusinesses and global institutional investors. The scale is striking: the country’s largest landholders manage portfolios measured in millions of hectares, while the leading investors hold agricultural and water assets worth billions of dollars.
The picture is not simply one of overseas ownership. Australian families and operators remain central to the pastoral sector, particularly across the north, but pension funds, private-equity investors and large asset managers now exert major influence in cropping, horticulture, dairy, water and livestock.
Land area versus asset value
The biggest landholder is not necessarily the biggest investor by value. Vast northern cattle and sheep stations can cover enormous areas but may have lower value per hectare than irrigated cropping, permanent horticulture, dairy enterprises or properties with substantial water entitlements.
| Measure | Leading example | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Land controlled | Viv Oldfield and Donny Costello / Crown Point Pastoral | Their combined pastoral interests reportedly exceed 9 million hectares, illustrating the exceptional scale of northern grazing holdings. |
| Agricultural asset value | PSP Investments | The Canadian pension manager is estimated to hold about A$8.5 billion in Australian agricultural assets across livestock, dairy, horticulture, cropping and water-linked investments. |
| Institutional pastoral platform | Macquarie Asset Management / Paraway | Paraway is a major national livestock platform of roughly 4.5 million hectares, managed within Macquarie’s agricultural funds business. |
This distinction matters for investors and rural communities alike: hectares indicate physical control of land, while enterprise value better reflects the concentration of capital, productive infrastructure, water security and higher-value agricultural activity.
Australia’s largest landholders
Central Australian pastoralists Viv Oldfield and Donny Costello remain among the country’s dominant private landholders through Crown Point Pastoral and associated holdings. Their combined footprint has been reported at more than 9 million hectares—larger than several European nations—reflecting the vast station sizes typical of Australia’s arid and semi-arid interior.
Consolidated Pastoral Company has also been a major consolidator. Backed by UK private-equity investor Guy Hands, CPC has expanded through large acquisitions of northern sheep and cattle stations, strengthening its presence across Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Other major pastoral land controllers include:
- Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), which operates extensive cattle country in Queensland and the Northern Territory and has historically controlled more than 6 million hectares.
- North Australian Pastoral Company, another large-scale northern cattle operator with holdings extending across the north.
- Williams Cattle Company, a substantial South Australian pastoral business with a multi-million-hectare footprint.
- Paraway Pastoral, the Macquarie-managed livestock platform with stations across several states
The biggest investor
PSP’s ownership of the Kooba aggregation near Griffith in New South Wales is a useful example of the current market: the investment combines productive agricultural land with valuable water entitlements, a combination increasingly sought by long-term capital.
Macquarie Asset Management ranks among the largest Australian-based agricultural fund managers. Its portfolio includes Paraway Pastoral, Cubbie Station and broadacre cropping interests, although any proposed sale of Paraway would materially alter the ranking and ownership map.
New York-based TIAA, through Nuveen Natural Capital, is another major participant, with substantial exposure to Australian cropping and horticulture. Its strategy reflects the appeal of diversified, professionally managed farmland as a long-duration real-asset investment.
Other significant capital sources include:
- Warakirri Asset Management, an Australian manager with major agricultural investments.
- Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co., controlled by Gina Rinehart interests and active across cattle, cropping and supply-chain assets.
- Dutch pension-linked capital, including investment exposure associated with Paraway.
- International investors from Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, often investing through Australian operating companies and fund managers.
Why capital is flowing in
Australian agriculture offers a combination that is attractive to institutional investors: export-oriented food production, exposure to global demand for protein and fibre, relatively transparent property rights, and opportunities to improve productivity, water efficiency and supply-chain integration.
Northern Australia continues to attract established cattle families and pastoral operators focused on breeding, backgrounding and expanding into feedlots, processing or other post-farmgate assets. In the south, activity is more concentrated in higher-value cropping, horticulture, dairy and mixed-farming regions, where institutional buyers can assemble scalable portfolios and link land investment with water, carbon or regenerative-agriculture strategies.
Natural-capital investment is also becoming more prominent. Investors increasingly assess farms not only for agricultural earnings, but for potential revenue or risk management associated with carbon projects, biodiversity outcomes, soil improvement, water efficiency and emissions reduction.
What this means
The concentration of ownership does not mean Australia’s farming landscape is dominated solely by foreign buyers; domestic families, listed companies, superannuation-linked funds and Australian managers still play decisive roles. However, nine of the 10 largest agricultural investors reportedly have some form of offshore backing, showing how global pension and investment capital has become embedded in the sector.
For rural property markets, the key trend is a divide between scale-driven northern pastoral acquisitions and capital-intensive southern investments in irrigated land, horticulture, cropping, dairy, water and natural-capital opportunities. The result is a more professionalised and financially sophisticated farm market—one where buyers increasingly evaluate land as both a productive business and a long-term strategic asset.
Interestingly, closer to home, 40% of farmland in Uruguay is owned by foreign owners.
One major difference is land tenure. The enormous “stations” associated with northern beef production and remote grazing are disproportionately on leasehold because much of that country was historically retained as Crown land and allocated for grazing. Pastoral leases cover roughly 44% of Australia’s land area, concentrated in arid and semi-arid regions and tropical savannas.
In South America, this sort of ownership is shunned as being the result of colonialism and does not exist.
There are moves to remedy the lack of opportunity for local farm owners in Argentina to attract foreign investment capital by the Milei Government, but to date it has been blocked by the Catholic Church, Socialist Movements and others who think the soil might be removed in the dead of night. Meanwhile, much of the countryside remains underdeveloped.
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