Jim Rogers, the globe-trotting investor, adventurer and writer who champions commodities, has been appointed to the board of the farmland investment firm Genagro as a non-executive director, as part of a boardroom reshuffle.

The board is being reorganised following the sale of a controlling interest in Genagro’s first farmland investment, Agrifirma Brasil, to a Brazilian private equity group.

Genagro, which was founded by Ian Watson and Jim Slater in 2008, expects to make further investments in early stage farmland or farming-related businesses in advance of a planned listing of its shares, provisionally targeted for 2013. (Slater, a veteran of the investment world, attracted controversy when his investment business was hit amid the secondary banking crisis of the mid-1970s, although his fortunes later recovered.)

Besides managing his own money as chairman of Rogers Holdings and Beeland Interests, Rogers is a broadcaster and speaker on trends in global markets, and the author of several books, including Hot Commodities, A Bull in China and Investment Biker.  A graduate of Yale and Oxford University, his early career was spent on Wall Street, where he co-founded the Quantum Fund in 1973, alongside hedge fund legend George Soros.

Rogers devised the eponymous the Rogers International Commodity Indices, a series for tracking the movement of global commodity prices. In February this year he created the Rogers Global Resources Equity Index to track the price of a basket of leading natural resources shares (the agriculture, mining, metals and energy sectors, as well as solar, wind and hydro.)

“I have been on record for years that the future is going to belong to farmers.  The world is facing a growing demand for food and animal feed.  It urgently needs private sector capital, management expertise and technology to bring new areas of farmland into productive use,” Rogers said.