ABSTRACT
This chapter endeavours to understand how an emerging group of South African intermediaries are currently trying to shape or reshape, farms as investment opportunities for institutional investors, that is as an asset class. The production of an 'asset', that is the attempt to 'unlock financial value', relies on the active work of shaping and promoting by intermediaries who aim to attract financial flows. South African farms, as well as other agricultural assets on the African continent, are currently the object of such a translation attempt. A financial asset is structured on a standard flow of modelling and calculation. But, to 'unlock financial value', asset promoters have 'to conform' social reality to these flows. Indeed, managers undertake a neutralisation, or a depoliticisation, of the farms in order to fit them into the 'bundle of assets' conception.
