Stampeding bulls redux...

So farmland is the next hot thing for the investment world, and Shondra Warner is the face of a new agculture. Warner is actually a legitimate farm girl, according to Brian O'Keefe, reporting in the latest edition of Fortune Magazine. O'Keefe says that she is "A Nebraska farm girl who went on to a globetrotting career as a derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs and then as a hedge fund executive in London."

 

I don't know about you, but I find a few things in that description kind of scary. Like "derivatives trader," "hedge fund executive," and "Goldman Sachs."

If people like Shondra Warner can do to agriculture what they did to the world financial system, we'll all be eating nothing but dirt a decade or two from now. Another guy O'Keefe talked to is an American named Phil Heilberg who has leased a million acres of farmland in Southern Sudan.

Talk about scary. Can you use "Darfur" "genocide" and "investment opportunity" in the same sentence? And can you imagine any kind of scenario where you could lease a million acres from Sudanese landowners, not one of whom has been party to horror? Good luck, Phil Heilberg. Just be sure to wash your hands before you eat anything grown on those million acres. And wash them again. And again. And again.

Back to Shondra Warner, who at least is sticking to U.S. farmland and who told O'Keefe that "Farming might not look sophisticated. It might wear overalls and talk funny. But it's older than Wall Street. It's a fine-tuned machine, and it's a very difficult business."

And, she says, there are big opportunities if you execute right.

Aw shucks, you guys, let's kick the *hi* off our clodhoppers, drive our jalopies down to the Dairy Queen and compare spreadsheets and P&Ls.

I don't know how you can work with farmers if you're going to condescend to them, and maybe that's not what Warner is doing, but it smells like it to me. And what really annoys me with O'Keefe, the reporter who wrote this mess, is that he appears not to have spoken to a single farmer. Wouldn't it be nice to find out how farmers feel about being bought out or maybe trampled by that nice Nebraska farm girl?

I'd be especially interested in what he might have discussed with one of those Sudanese guys.

There's a lot of blame to go around in the financial meltdown. You know, the one that sucked $5 trillion out of the American economy. I believe financial journalists own a huge slice of that blame, and I think it's this kind of quick-buck reporting that helped make us what we are today.