Forbes Elworthy was brought up on Craigmore Station in the South Island of New Zealand. He trained in Agricultural Economics at Lincoln University where he was student president in 1984. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1985. After some time at Goldman Sachs, he completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1992. Forbes worked as a credit trader at Merrill Lynch from 1992 to 1999 where he headed a convertibles trading desk.
Forbes then founded Credit Market Analysis (CMA), a real-time financial price discovery service and data community which served over 200 credit market clients and was sold to CME in 2008. Subsequently, Forbes launched an agricultural fund management business, Craigmore Sustainables. In 2012, Craigmore spun off “Map Of Agriculture”, which was then its farm financial returns benchmarking database. Forbes remains chair of Craigmore but as CEO of Map of Agriculture, he focuses on building it up as a global provider of farming information and communication solutions.