About 89% fully Australian owned, 6% majority (>50%) Australian owned, 6% majority foreign owned:

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/7127.0Main+Features1December%202010?OpenDocument

(adds to 101% due to rounding)

Can someone please explain why a business that has gone into receivership and which can't attract Australian buyers is of interest to foreign buyers? What do they do differently to make the business profitable and why wouldn't an Australian owner do the same? I've always wondered.

Farms are after all businesses. And the value of a business is largely dependant on the income they can reliably produce.
Sure the value of farms is declining and rightly so, given the patent overvaluing.
The advent of foreign speculators in the residential market has clearly contributed to Australia having the highest median house prices in the English speaking world.
We don't want the farming sector to follow suit
I saw one family farm sold up not far from where I live.
And yes it was very sad!
This third generation farmer was fairly typical.
Badly advised simply to avoid paying tax.
I mean, farmers already can average their incomes over seven years!
Even so, his sheds were full of still very serviceable tractors and harvesters etc.
Had he been better advised he would have kept using his still serviceable plant, paid a bit more tax, and bought a dozen or more off farm investments.
I mean, just the money paid for just one of his tractors, would have been enough to instead, buy six nearly new houses outright, in a nearby town. And if one added up al the unneeded plant, that number could have been quadrupled.
Meaning, he would then have some sort of reasonable income stream during the bad years.
Foreign buyers might have been welcome for this one farmer, but not by any of the Aussies, wanting to increase the size of their land holdings.
Or buy another farm for some/one of the kids.
Cashed up foreign buyers invariably distort the market; and or, price out locals, and therefore, need to be kept out.
In any event, there are plenty of former fruit farms looking for new owners, which may be one of the real reasons rural land prices seem to be depressed.
It just might be a case of supply and demand?
Too much supply, and too little demand.
There simply has to be better solutions to badly managed/over leveraged farms, than carpet bagging foreign investors/property speculators!
Rhrosty.

It is up to govt to get the right balance on behalf a variety of community concerns weighing up different issues against each other, as Rhrosty suggests.

This feelgood bs, she'll be right mate and we have nothing to worry about, is just that, feelgood bs.

Sure we could sell more and more to overseas rich elites, probably aided by unfair practices in their own society.

We could also create a housing boom if we just opened it all to foreigners, but how many Austs are going to accept that. I suppose the 100% free traders living in noddy land will

Candide
There are lots of reasons why foreign investors might be able to farm profitably when Australians can’t. They could have links to supply chains in their home countries that guarantee markets and prices. They might face fewer import barriers in their home countries than foreign-owned firms. They could have access to technology and expertise we lack. They might be able to spread risks across several locations or countries, mitigating the effects of natural disasters and climate variability than make farming so uncertain. They could have access to cheaper capital than Australian lenders will provide. Or, they may just be willing to gamble that the declining rainfall we have seen in parts of the wheat belt in recent years are not a permanent shift. There are probably others as well, but these seem to me the most likely.

Chris
There are limits on who can buy houses in Australia, and on the types of property that temporary resident can buy. If for some reason we removed all of those limits there would not necessarily be any effect on rents or house prices, as these are determined by the supply and demand for rental and owner-occupied property. Unless the changes affected the size of the housing stock or the number of Australian residents, the market fundamentals would not really change.

As it is, the rules currently encourage foreign investors to buy new or unoccupied housing, or build new homes, so my guess is their effect is to add to supply slightly and so make housing more affordable, though the effect is probably small.

http://www.firb.gov.au/content/faq.asp#nonresidents

Thanks Rhian