Financiers diversifying portfolios by backing farmers

It's an alarming statistic: humans will need to produce more food in the next 40 years than we did in the last 10,000 years combined.

And while savvy farmers and forward-thinking scientists are devising ideas to try to manage this demand, it takes money to get their ideas off the ground.

A recent article from the print edition of The Economist reads "with sprawling cities gobbling up arable land, agricultural productivity gains decreasing, and demand for biofuels increasing, supply is not keeping up with demand."

The piece goes on to note other contributing factors to this gap in supply and demand, including demographic changes in farming families that are seeing farms cease operations because there are no successors to take over and a lack of capital at farms to implement new technologies.