(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Why Do Foreign Investors Buy American Farmland? [1]

['Sarah Melotte', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']

Date: 2025-07-23

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.



Foreign investors own almost 46 million acres of farm land in the United States, according to data from the 1978 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA), a federal law meant to track international interest in American land. Foreign-owned farmland had a total estimated value of $82.6 billion in 2023, the last year of available data.

Readers should note that AFIDA data doesn’t always accurately reflect the current value of a tract of farmland. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, USDA employees make manual mistakes while entering data. Other times, the value of the land reflects its original purchase value, which might differ from its current value if it was purchased decades ago.

In 2023, 35 states introduced legislation aimed at limiting foreign ownership of American agricultural land. Much of that legislation was targeted at foreign adversaries, like China and Iran. According to my analysis of AFIDA data, China currently owns 277,000 acres of American farmland.

In Val Verde County, Texas, a Chinese billionaire named Sun Guangxin owned 7% of the county’s total land area. One of Guangxin’s subsidiaries owns nearly 30,000 acres of Val Verde County alone.

In 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abott signed the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act to bar entities from “hostile nations” from tapping into the state’s power grids and other critical infrastructure.

United States Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins wants to take it even further by outright banning Chinese ownership of American farmland, according to an interview with far-right site Breitbart News. Although her comments may stem from a legitimate concern about national security, critics say her rhetoric exacerbates anti-Asian stereotypes.

A Chinese-American advocacy nonprofit called Committee of 100 said her comments “legitimize harmful and xenophobic claims about immigrants that would exacerbate rising anti-Asian violence that has negatively affected U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike.”

But is foreign-owned farmland part of a conspiracy to ruin America, or is it just a consequence of global capitalism?

In her 2020 book Fields of Gold, Environmental Studies professor Madeleine Fairbairn describes investor-owned farmland purchases as “land grabs.” She writes that interest in financializing farmland surged in 2008, when investors began seeking real assets that hold long-term value and offer protection against the volatility of the stock market. Farmland, which tends to appreciate steadily and hedge against inflation, became an attractive option. But investors aren’t necessarily interested in farming the land themselves. They see it as a financial asset, a way to collect rent and capital gains to grow their portfolios.

“Investors want land to behave more like a stock or bond and less like an unwieldy expanse of dirt,” wrote Fairbairn.

We live in an economic system that demands constant expansion and ever-new avenues for investment. It’s often easier to blame whoever seems like the adversary of the moment than to confront the deeper reality: our system rewards those with wealth for treating land as a source of impersonal income.

Fields of Gold

In this edition of the Rural Index, I explore which foreign entities own American land and where their holdings are located.

Canada is the largest foreign owner of American farmland, holding over 15.3 million acres that have a total estimated value of $17 billion.

The Canadian John Hancock Life Insurance Company owns over 745,000 acres as a part of its investment portfolio, with most of that land concentrated in Washington, Oregon, and Maine. About 20% of private farmland is investor-owned in Maine, according to an analysis of USDA data conducted by the Maine Morning Star.

One of the largest tracts that John Hancock Life Insurance owns is nearly 93,000 acres in Baker County, Oregon, a rural community of 16,600 residents that borders Idaho.

Approximately 4.8 million acres of American farmland are owned by foreign energy companies. Invenergy Wind Development, a Canadian renewable energy firm, owns 2.3 million acres of farmland with a total estimated value of $9.8 million. Most of Invenergy’s farmland is in Colorado, where they own half a million acres with an estimated value of $2.1 million.

Most of Invenergy’s Colorado properties are concentrated in the eastern part of the state. In Kiowa County, Colorado, which borders Kansas, Invenergy owns 200,300 acres of land with an estimated value of about $809,800.

Behind Canada, the Netherlands is the second largest foreign owner of American farmland. Red Mountain Timber Company, a Dutch organization that owns a collection of forests that once belonged to an American pulp and paper company International Paper, owns 1.7 million acres in the American South.

Red Mountain Timber owns nearly 250,000 acres in Louisiana alone. In LaSalle Parish, Louisiana, a rural community in the central part of the state, Red Mountain Timber owns 164,100 acres of forest. In nearby Catahoula Parish, Red Mountain Timber owns 53,200 acres of forest.

The Canadian company, Katahdin Forest Management, LLC, is the owner of the largest tract of foreign-owned American farmland. In Piscataquis County, Maine, a rural community of nearly 17,000, Katahdin Forest Management owns a 171,400-acre tract of forestland worth more than $28 million.

Related

Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/why-do-foreign-investors-buy-american-farmland/2025/07/23/

Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/