AFTER an hour’s drive along mud tracks lined with cornflowers, dandelion and ragwort the farmer stops and points to a copse on the horizon, deep inside Russia’s “Black Earth” belt. “Everything you can see from here is ours,” he says, swatting a horsefly from a sun-tanned brow.

In every direction, as far as the eye can see, the land is carpeted in waist-deep wheat, so dense and golden it seems to glow in the afternoon sun.

It looks like the stuff of a Soviet propaganda film.

Thirty years ago it might have been. Only this farmer is not Russian. He is Colin Hinchley, a 44-year-old former contract farmer from Nottingham.

And this 12,000-hectare (30,000-acre) farm in the Penza region in southern Russia is owned not by Russians but by a pair of British investors — the first foreigners to buy agricultural land in Russia.

“It’s just awesome,” Mr Hinchley said, shaking his head in disbelief. “The average British farm is 350 acres. You could fit three of them in this field.”

Mr Hinchley is a pioneer, one of a growing number of British farmers heading east to escape the crippling bureaucracy and diminishing returns of agriculture at home.

He is now being held up as a model for Russian farmers and investors seeking to regenerate their countryside and reclaim Russia’s historical status as an agricultural superpower.

In 1913 Tsarist Russia produced a record 90 million tonnes of grain — a third of global supply at the time. In 1990 output hit a Soviet-era high of 117 million tonnes.

Grain production plummeted, however, after the Soviet collapse, when subsidies dried up and collective farms divided their land and machinery between their workers.

This year Russia is expected to harvest only 75 million tonnes, 3 per cent of the world total, from 10 per cent of the world’s arable land.

The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that Russia has the potential to feed a billion people and yet, with a population of 143 million, it is a net importer of food.

And with the global grain harvest expected to fall short of consumption this year, millions of acres are lying idle in one of the most fertile farming areas on the planet.

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