By Jim Meadows
The amount of American cropland, pastureland and forestland owned by foreign investors continued to increase in 2023, according to a recent analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Foreign citizens and companies owned 3.61% of American agriculture land, according the analysis from Farm Bureau economist Daniel Munch, which cites data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That percentage equals 45.9 million acres – an increase of 1.6 million acres from 2022. Canadian investors own or lease about one-third of this land, which is the most of any country.
Renewable energy projects – especially wind energy – are driving much of this growth, continuing a multi-year trend. The analysis found that more than half of the increase of foreign-owned land from 2022 to 2023 was tied to entities with renewable energy-related names.
The increase in foreign-owned farmland has been ongoing for several years. From 2010 to 2023, the total acreage grew by 21 million acres, according to the analysis.
As a whole, foreign investors own very little of America’s agricultural land, said Bruce Sherrick, a University of Illinois agricultural land economist. He thinks concerns about foreign ownership are overblown.
“Impact in food supply is always a sensitive political issue,” Sherrick said. “But again, the fractions are so incredibly tiny in the U.S. that it’s hard to find where the coverage is proportional to the potential impact.”
Much of the public concern expressed about foreign ownership has focused on nations deemed adversarial to the U.S., such as China or Russia, the Farm Bureau analysis notes. Land owned by investors from those nations make up just 0.03% of American farmland, with a majority of that land held by Chinese investors. And the report found that land owned by Russian, Iranian and Chinese investors declined between 2022 and 2023.
Sherrick said one area of legitimate concern is whether foreign-owned land is located near a government or other sensitive property.
In 2023, the city council in Grand Forks, North Dakota, voted to deny permission to the Chinese company Fufeng to build a corn milling plant on agricultural land they owned a few miles from a military base, after the Air Force raised national security concerns. Fufeng later put the land up for sale, after acknowledging that the plant would not be built.
State and federal laws
Concerns about foreign ownership of U.S. farmland have led to lawmakers trying to control it.
A 1978 federal law, the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA), requires foreign investors to report their agricultural land holdings. And some 25 states have laws restricting ownership and investment in private farmland, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas. That list includes Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas.
Iowa has one of the strictest laws. It bans foreign governments or investors from owning agricultural land in Iowa, with some exceptions – including if it was bought before 1980, is no more than 320 acres, or is being used for research or non-farming purposes.
Rabail Chandio, a farmland economist at Iowa State University, said the restrictions on foreign ownership of agricultural land do not extend to land used for other purposes. She said farmland seems to hold a special position in our society.
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