Foreign Owners Buying More American Farmland

NPR reports that foreign investors have doubled the amount of American farmland they own in this century:

When the stock market tanked during the last recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned, it’s been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations.

It’s likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation’s farmland will change hands in the next few decades.

“Texas is kind of a free-for-all, so they don’t have a limit on how much land can be owned,” say’s Ohio Farm Bureau’s Ty Higgins, “You look at Iowa and they restrict it — no land in Iowa is owned by a foreign entity” [Renee Wilde, “‘American Soil’ Is Increasingly Foreign Owned,” NPR: All Things Considered, 2019.05.27].

The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting calculated in 2014 that folks from outside the United States owned 27.3 million acres of American farmland. That’s just about 3% of our 915 million acres of productive land. That’s like owning all of Virginia, or owning Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, and almost half of Massachusetts. (If I were buying states, I’d take the latter deal: those six and a half smaller states have 40 Electoral College votes; Virginia has just 13.)

SDCL Chapter 43-2A prohibits alien ownership of South Dakota agricultural land. Nonetheless, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, people from outside the United States own 121,705 acres of South Dakota farmland. That’s less than one percent of our 42 million acres of farmland.

Come of the biggest foreign holders of South Dakota farmland are corn or hog farmers but wind farmers, like our friends from Spain and Italy.

Note that this 2014 list doesn’t show any farmland held in South Dakota by Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods. Our Chinese friends do own 146,000 acres of U.S. farmland.

Related Reading: John Tsitrian notes that the Chinese are eager to buy land to plant soybeans to compensate for the Trump tariffs… and the Russians are eager to sell it to them