Foreign companies and individuals collectively own nearly 45 million acres of American agricultural land in the United States, according to federal data released last month, nearly double the amount those entities owned just a decade ago.
The increase in foreign investment in U.S. agricultural land has taken place in all but a small handful of states. Only one state — New Hampshire — has fewer acres under foreign ownership today than in 2013, a review of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency finds.
Foreign entities have gone on significant spending sprees in states like Texas, where foreigners now own more than 5.6 million acres; Oklahoma, where foreigners hold 1.8 million acres; and Colorado, where they own 2.4 million acres.
State legislators in recent years have sought to restrict foreign ownership of agricultural land, to varying degrees. Some of the recent legislation has come amid growing concerns that potentially adversarial nations like China may be snapping up American land, especially near military bases in Texas and North Dakota.
“The United States is the most powerful country in the world, not because we have a powerful military, but because we can feed ourselves,” South Dakota Rep. J.D. Wangsness (R) said in February, as a state House panel heard testimony on a bill limiting foreign ownership of land. “Protecting our ag land from foreign ownership is a national security issue.”
Arkansas lawmakers in 2023 approved legislation restricting companies based in certain foreign countries from owning land. Virginia lawmakers approved a similar bill restricting a “foreign adversary” from owning agricultural land, language that relies on the U.S. Commerce Department’s definition of foreign adversaries.
The current list of foreign adversaries includes China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
Those shares still represent relatively small amounts of the available farmland across the United States: Foreigners hold 3.6% of agricultural land in Texas, 4.3% in Oklahoma and 7% in Colorado.
But foreign-owned entities own a whopping 21% of agricultural land in Maine, the highest share of any state, and 17% of agricultural land in Hawaii, where the share has nearly doubled in a decade.
The federal data show Canada is the single biggest source of foreign investment in U.S. land. Canadian entities hold about 15 million acres of land in the United States, or about a third of the overall total. Firms from the Netherlands hold 5.2 million acres, while investors based in Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany each hold about half as much land.
The federal data show almost half of foreign holdings, nearly 22 million acres, are in forest land. That’s the case in Maine, where 3.4 million acres of forest land are held by foreign investors out of a total of 3.5 million foreign-owned acres.
Most of the foreign entities that own land are timber concerns, according to an analysis of the federal data by Daniel Munch, an economist at the U.S. Farm Bureau. Munch found seven of the 10 largest foreign property owners are involved in the timber industry, including two Canadian timber companies, one from the Netherlands and an Ireland-based company that sells corrugated packaging.
About 13 million acres of cropland across the United States are held by foreign investors. Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma all have more than a million acres of cropland under foreign ownership. More than 900,000 acres of cropland are foreign-owned in Kansas and Nebraska, as well.
Congress voted in 1978 to require disclosure of foreign ownership of agricultural land, data the USDA maintains and reports on a yearly basis.
Chinese ownership of agricultural land — especially the purchases near military bases — have spurred recent legislative action and warnings that one of America’s leading adversaries is snapping up territory.
“[I]n the decades since we first addressed this issue, adversaries like China have grown significantly more aggressive on the world stage, constantly looking for any opening to assert themselves at the expense of our country. One all-too-common weapon in this battle is the purchase of American farmland,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) said in April, after she signed legislation limiting foreign ownership of agricultural land.
“Our state’s fertile soil and unmatched production capacity make us a natural target for this strategy,” Reynolds said. “That makes us a natural leader in the race to stave off the evolving threat to American agriculture.”
But the federal data show Chinese-based firms own only a tiny fraction of American soil — 383,000 acres, or about one-thirtieth the amount owned by Canada-based firms.
About half of the Chinese-owned land, 192,000 acres, is spread across Texas, most of it concentrated in land a parent company had planned to turn into a wind farm. Chinese firms also own a few tens of thousands of acres in North Carolina, Missouri and Utah.