Financiers look to the fields for their latest offering

[NEW YORK] His boots were caked with mud when Thomas ST Gimbel, a longtime hedge fund executive, slipped in a strawberry patch. It was the plumpness of a strawberry that had distracted him.

Mr Gimbel, who once headed the hedge fund division of Credit Suisse, now spends more time discussing crop yields than stock or bond yields.

He is the man on the ground for a group of investors - including New York's biggest real estate dynasty, two Florida sugar barons and the founder of a multibillion-dollar investment firm - who have been buying up farms across the US through a real estate investment trust (Reit) called American Farmland Co.