Not a day goes by in these recent weeks that the conversation about the purchase of farmland by non-farmers doesn’t come up. Mostly it is talk about China, or Bill Gates. In fact, if you do a search with any search engine by typing in “acres owned,” you will see what people are most frequently researching. For the most part, it is a distraction from where the real dangers exist.
For example, for all of the attention that China is receiving the data shows the Chinese own roughly 360,000 acres. Now that sounds like a lot to someone who owns a section or less, but the truth of the matter is that this is not much at all. Where the Chinese are smart is that they are not buying this land as a country. They have commissioned people into each state to buy the land independently. As I recently discussed with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt. Oklahoma is one of the leading states China has targeted for buying land.
I might just add that as I was putting this piece together I received a news alert that I thought was quite timely. As printed in ResistTheMainStream.org:
“In introducing the bill dubbed the Securing America’s Land From Foreign Interference Act, Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) cited a 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) saying that foreign individuals and entities held an interest in nearly 37.6 million acres of U.S. agricultural land.”
First off, before we get completely engulfed with the land owned by foreign countries, do you know how much our federal government currently owns? At last count it was 620 million acres. That is 28% of the total United States land mass. The states individually own another 5% so collectively the government owns 1 of every 3 acres in the U.S. And for the record, the Bureau of Land Management with the Department of Interior is still acquiring land like the 35,000 acres it purchased this summer near Casper, Wyoming.
So what about Bill Gates? Bill Gates is 51st on the list of total acres of land owned. So why is every news story about America’s biggest farmland owner Bill Gates this or that? I do not know for sure, but what I do know is that I believe the most recent tally on the number of acres owned by Gates at 269,000 total.
So who owns more? John Malone tops the list at 2.2 million acres that he acquired with money made in media. The Emmerson Family is second at 2.1 million acres and they have old forestry money. Ted Turner has slipped from first to third as he now only owns 2 million acres. The Reed Family, another forestry entity, checks in at 1.7 million acres.
Stan Kroenke is currently an interesting wildcard as he is now at 1.5 million acres and garnered quite a bit of attention when he made the single largest ranch purchase of the Waggoner Ranch in Texas for $725 million. For what it’s worth, Kroenke was once married to Ann Walton of Walmart fame and currently owns the Los Angeles Rams plus the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, and the U.K. Arsenal soccer club.
For those that might be wondering, the most notable actual ranch in the discussion is the King Ranch of Texas at 911,215 acres but there are no new developments.
I might include the American Prairie Reserve is trying to achieve its goal of 3.2 million acres in Montana. APR is the new version of the old concept of Buffalo Commons and they keep charging forward.
So here is the moral of the story. All of these entities are in the market to acquire land on a daily basis. It is my opinion that they not only don’t care what the true market value is; they are actually paying significantly above market price for these properties so that people like us can’t even afford to pay the taxes let alone buy the land in this inflationary market. I have laid out the problem hoping that the solution will follow with all the great discussion from the country that ensues. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
Editor’s note: The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the views of High Plains Journal. Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].
