Why new investors like Heech Sung get excited by what ag is offering

She says farmland is an uncrowded, evolving investment asset class offering plenty of ethical and new technology incentives to get involved while the opportunities are fresh.

"The opportunities and challenges this sector faces are something people from all walks of life should lean into and participate in," she said.

Her enthusiasm for farming has been fuelled, in part, by an admiration for Australia's farmland stewards - "some of the most incredible and capable people you'll ever come across".

A former globe-trotting corporate lawyer with the likes of Macquarie Group, Boeing and Qantas, Ms Sung said she now felt "more comfortable wearing dirty boots and an Akubra hat on a farm than walking down Pitt Street" to her Sydney office.

She heads up natural capital investment with Australia's Clean Energy Finance Corporation - the federal government's "green bank", similar to its farm sector lending sibling, the Regional Investment Corporation.

The CEFC's role includes supporting investors building renewable energy projects and zero emissions enterprises, and developing agricultural assets as carbon sequestration sinks and more environmentally sustainable producers.

Its recent investments include a stake in the $200 million Wilga Farming partnership with Canadian investment giant, CDPQ, and others.

Wilga, managed by Gunn Agri Partners, is currently based in North West NSW, but has an Australia-wide agenda to buy farms to promote and research sustainable initiatives to lift productivity with less synthetic fertiliser use, rotational grazing, and better soil carbon management.

"In the investment world agriculture used to be considered something of a poor cousin compared to the high profile asset categories like commercial real estate and infrastructure," she said.

"Now it's an asset class entrepreneurs see as an opportunity, and the fun thing is it's an area that is really important to all of us.

"From a life on earth perspective, so much depends on how we manage our natural assets."

Importantly, the climate and decarbonisation challenge was prompting a surge of exciting scientific and technological investment in agriculture to help boost the landscape's resilience and productivity in the face of changing climatic forces.

"It's imperative we manage these assets sustainably to maximise their output for our food security and to enhance their natural capital value," Ms Sung told NSW Farm Writers' recent Agribuzz event.

She said experience and research gains achieved by corporate scale investors would flow across the industry to help family farming enterprises with far fewer financial and labour resources adapt their own operations to be more resilient and productive.

While she had not grown up on the land, and indeed had migrated to Australia as a school girl, anybody "who looks like me can, and should, participate in this important goal".

In fact, contrary to how non-rural dwellers might perceive farmers and regional communities Ms Sung had found the farm sector as "most willing to embrace that difference".

"They accept you for who you are, at face value - you can have a proper conversation and there's no BS," she said.

"I don't have the usual 'grew up on the land' story, and I didn't know the difference between Bos indicus or Bos taurus cattle, but I found I really liked talking with farmers anyway."

Having now worked in the agricultural investment sector for a decade she also found a lot of similar curiosity emerging from other professional investors who were seeking expertise and ideas about the industry.

"It's a sector which needs more experts from different backgrounds and investors with curiosity and skills," she said.

Agriculture as a career also offered a broad spectrum of exciting opportunities working alongside researchers and scientists focused nationally significant decarbonisation and climate themes - and "the stewards of our finite resources who we've entrusted to produce more from less".