Andrew Arbuckle: Where best to invest in agriculture? I'd hold on to your money

Sometimes, late of an evening or while driving along some boring patch of motorway, my mind turns to what I would do if I had a large bag of cash to invest. It might well be a popular pastime but perhaps this harmless day-dreaming is not one many people will own up to in Who's Who.

The field is narrowed considerably if one of the requirements is the cash has to be spent in the agricultural industry.

I had a spell of letting my mind drift away from the realities of life this last week after speaking to one of the leading land agents in the country. As always, he was talking up the price of agricultural land. With a bit of life in the cereal market, potato growers easing themselves out of the pain of the 2009 crop, and sheep producers benefiting from improved market returns, my expert friend believed there would still be a bit of lift in land prices.

All estate agents have a daily injection of optimism before they get to work, and the trouble here is that I see quite a number of "for sale" signs adorning plots of land. One hundred acres on offer here, a few fields for sale there - and the signs all seem to have been there for a length of time.

My information is that in the west of the country there are a number of mainly livestock farms that have lain on the market for some time.

The whole market is missing the insertion of cash that came from developers buying a field or two or even a whole farm on the outskirts of town, before the house building industry closed down.

So despite Mark Twain's advice to "invest in land, they are not making it any more" I do not think I will be dashing into any estate agents and dumping my bag of imaginary cash on their desk in exchange for a parcel of land.

So where else would there be a good investment in the farming world?

I was down at the Texel sale on Thursday and every- one was quite chipper about the trade. What about investing some of my imaginary cash in top genes?

Let me see. Last year, there was a big flurry of interest in a lamb that was eventually sold for 220,000 guineas to top breeder Jimmy Douglas, Cairness. The lamb was called Deveronvale Perfection.

So if my money bag was big enough I could perhaps afford to buy one of his perfect offspring and that would put me right at the top of the breeding pyramid.

I decided not to buy the first lamb in the ring as there seemed to be some spirited bidding before it was knocked down to John Sinnett, of Stockton, who over the years has bought and sold a number of sheep from the same pedigree breeder.

I could easily have bought the second lamb or third lamb from the record breaker's pen, for when they went through the ring there was no ripple of expectation and no big prices.They may be yet to come for this record-setting investment but meantime, the ringside experts seem to think the offspring are slightly less than perfection.

I think I will keep my cash for a more assured investment than pedigree livestock breeding. It is a favourite pastime for some who have made their money in industry, computer technology or whatever, but everyone in the pedigree world knows that very few of these high rollers ever recoup their cash.

I suppose I could start playing the cereal futures market and make and lose great dollops of money, but sadly I still have memories of the late 1970s, when several farmers lost their farms through dealing in potato futures. The warning then was not to do it unless you had the physical stock.

That advice is still appropriate and so I am back into the buying- a-farm scenario.

By this time, I have turned off the motorway and am back in the countryside.

My head goes from side to side taking in the harvest action and that is actually much better than imagining what I would do if I had lots of cash.