Why Invest With Us?
Returns While Cultivating a Better World
Investing in Agrarius provides a unique opportunity to access the high potential yet underinvested agricultural sector. We transform market inefficiencies into investment opportunities through our sector expertise, origination network, and project-based strategy.
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Unique Listed Agriculture Exposure: Gain diversified exposure across the full agricultural value chain within a regulated, transparent, and secure JSE-listed environment.
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Diversification: Add a unique, uncorrelated asset class to your portfolio, offering liquidity and transparent, market-driven pricing, typically not accessible to most investors.
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Capital Preservation: Our strategy is underpinned by low-risk, asset-backed debt investments, strengthened by multiple layers of risk mitigation.
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Inflation-Beating Returns: Target real rates of return designed to significantly outperform inflation, supported by tangible, real-economy investments.
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Impact Investing: Make a meaningful difference by supporting a systemically important sector, creating jobs in rural areas, and promoting sustainable practices, with all investments independently verified.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Diversification Across Agriculture Value Chain
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Our strategy is to invest across the entire agricultural value chain, from farm inputs to consumer products, focusing on clear cash-flow events and strong off-takers.
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Inputs/Extraction: Supply of essential resources like seeds, fertilizers, energy, and equipment or extraction of raw materials (e.g. water, minerals). Investment focus: Input manufacturing, seed technology, soil enhancers and agri-input distribution networks.
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Production/Farming: Cultivation of crops and livestock, including land preparation, planting, irrigation, pest control, and harvesting. Investment focus: Farm management systems, precision agriculture, climate-resilient farming, sustainable land use.
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Processing: Converting raw products into usable forms (e.g. milling grains, juicing fruit, pasteurizing milk). Investment focus: Agro-processing facilities, food safety technologies and value-added product development.
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Distribution: Transportation and storage of goods from farms to local and international markets, critical for reducing post-harvest losses and maximising margins. Investment focus: Cold-chain logistics, rural transportation, agri-supply chain platforms, warehousing.
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Packaging: Protecting and presentation of products for sale, also serving branding and regulatory functions. Investment focus: Sustainable packaging solutions, biodegradable materials, labeling technology.
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Manufacturing: Transformation into consumer-ready products (e.g., cereals, snacks, dairy products). Investment focus: Food manufacturing plants, automation in food processing and product innovation.
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Retail: Delivery of products to consumers via shops, supermarkets, or digital platforms. Investment focus: Agri-retail platforms, direct-to-consumer models and food traceability solutions.
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Consumption: End-user preferences and trends that drive sustainable demand. Investment focus: Consumer analytics, market trend forecasting and ethical or health-focused food brands.
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End of Life: Disposal or repurposing of waste and packaging through composting, recycling, or recovery. Investment focus: Food waste recovery, composting technologies, circular agri-economy startups.​
Risk Management: Our Bedrock
Our risk management process is multi-layered and robust, designed to protect investor capital at every stage.
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Rigorous Project Selection: We only select projects backed by blue-chip off-takers or industry best practices. We limit our exposure to 30-60% of the expected price, creating a safety buffer of at least 40%.
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Additional Collateral: Beyond the project's own assets, we take additional collateral from the project sponsor, which may include property, equipment or receivables. This collateral is held in a bankruptcy-remote Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the benefit of noteholders.
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Structural Subordination: Unlisted notes issued by Agrarius are structurally subordinated to the listed notes. This provides an additional "first-loss" buffer for listed noteholders.
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Profit Spread: A healthy margin is maintained between the returns from underlying transactions and the profit paid to noteholders. A portion of this spread is retained as a first-loss tranche.
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Securitisation Techniques: Performance fees are kept within the structure to align the interests of the administrator with those of the noteholders, creating another layer of protection.
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Diversification: Our portfolios are constructed to be uncorrelated across geographic locations, seasonality, agricultural sub-sectors, and stages of the production cycle. This systematic approach reduces risk and ensures stable, risk-adjusted returns.
Our Returns
For Agrarius as an agriculture-focused credit fund in South Africa, the ALBI (All Bond Index), CILI (Composite Inflation-Linked Index), and STEFI (Short-Term Fixed Interest Index) serve as appropriate performance benchmarks due to their differing risk and return profiles.
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ALBI represents the performance of the long-term nominal government bond market with average duration of approx 6 years. As Agrarius has high funding collateralisation and considerably lower duration of less than 3 years, we consider the risk profit relatively similar, aiming to match ALBI returns.
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CILI tracks inflation-linked government bonds as protection against real value erosion. Agrarius aims to exceed CILI returns due to higher value added created by its investments.
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STEFI reflects short-term money market instruments and represents a low-risk, highly liquid alternative. Agrarius aims to exceed STEFI returns due higher volatility and lower liquidity.
Who We Are
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Established in 2021, Agrarius is a JSE-listed funding with a mission is to transform agricultural sector to a sustainable economy, while investing in real assets, creating jobs for local rural communities, enhancing food security and creating new innovative sustainable products and practices. ​​​​​