In the mad scramble for the spoils left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs missed something - the soil of Mother Russia. Their mistake left the field open to foreign predators, including a Nottingham-based property developer that is now reaping a rich harvest.
Robert Monk owns Heartland Farms Penza, a 75,000-acre prairie in the fertile Volga region 400 miles southeast of Moscow. It is huge by British standards and, thanks to soaring world grain prices, Mr Monk is profiting. This week he is meeting investors in the hope that they will fund further land grabs, having been approached by fund managers interested in buying farmland.
"We have got the opportunity to buy an extra 150,000 hectares, but we haven't got the money," Mr Monk says. That would take Heartland Farms Penza to almost 500,000 acres, about the size of Nottinghamshire.
The cost of food has rocketed and hedge funds have filled their boots with wheat, corn and soybean futures. The funds are plotting their next move, trying to spot which asset class is about to come to the boil. Many believe that food inflation will drive up the cost of farmland. The soft, black soil of the Volga basin, where a tractor driver earns just £25 per week, could be their next target.
It takes more than an hour for a combine harvester to cross a field in Penza. The farm is so vast that the vehicles need satellite navigation. Moreover, the soil is high-quality and cheap, according to Richard Willows, the farm's general director and a former crop trader. Fed up with the cost and red tape of farming in Britain, Mr Willows and Colin Hinchley, the operations director, went east, found Penza and invited Mr Monk to invest. "The land and the labour is a tenth of what it costs in Europe but the price of wheat is the same," Mr Willows says.
Heartland Farms started in 2002, buying up 49-year leases on parcels of land from 1,500 farmers who had inherited shares in former Soviet communal farms. It then agreed the purchase of further plots from the local government to fill in the patchwork quilt of land and bring the total acreage to 75,000. About 30,000 acres are already productive, planted with wheat, barley and oilseed rape.
