How much U.S. farmland do foreign entities own?

Last October, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin made headlines when he ordered Chinese-owned Syngenta Seeds to divest 160 research acres in Craighead County, a rare show of enforcement of a state law restricting foreign ownership of U.S. farmland and adding fuel to a fire already catching across the country. 

Foreign ownership of American farmland is likely to continue to be a hot topic of concern. As other states may follow Arkansas’s lead and Congress debates national approaches, it’s important to consider the context of this issue and whether or not the heat is overblown.

A bit of history

"This issue goes back to the founding of our nation,” says Micah Brown, staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center. “It was even in the Declaration of Independence as a reason for breaking away from the crown. They didn’t like how the crown dealt with land ownership, especially alien land ownership.” 

According to Brown, the issue has been hot at various political flashpoints throughout America’s history. The nation is in the middle of its fifth such flashpoint, which started in 2021 with media attention around Chinese-owned businesses purchasing 130,000 acres near an Air Force base in Texas and 300 acres near an Air Force base in North Dakota. 

Today, 24 states have laws restricting foreign ownership or investment in agricultural land, nearly half of which were added in 2023.

Protecting 'national power' 

Brown says proponents of the recent laws often say “food security is national security,” a sentiment shared by Aimpoint Research, a global strategic intelligence firm that specializes in food and agriculture research, intelligence-gathering, and forecasting.

Mark Purdy, executive vice president of Aimpoint, says there are typically considered to be four elements of “national power”: diplomatic, informational, economic, and military, but Aimpoint believes “food power” is also essential. 

“You don’t have any one of those four elements of national power without food and the security of food,” he says.

Aimpoint has targeted foreign ownership of land as a vulnerability to America’s food power. Purdy says while 3% of American agricultural land being owned by foreign nationals may seem like a small number, he considers it significant. 

“Foreign land ownership in the United States is worrisome because that’s an asset that is immovable, and it’s also an asset that’s likely irrecoverable,” he says. “We’re not creating any more farmland that I know of, and so in some respects, depending on who’s purchasing it, unless we do recover it, when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Purdy says he doesn’t think the United States should have a protectionist mind-set when it comes to this issue but rather a national strategy. 

“We want a forward-looking, innovative, global force of agriculture that has great trade lanes and where the United States is the provider, and that requires partners from around the globe,” he says. 

However, up to now, Brown says laws around foreign ownership have been left up to states largely because the judiciary has determined in interpreting the U.S. Constitution that property law should be set at a state level. 

“No foreign ownership laws are the same,” he says. “There’s no uniform approach. They’ve done something different, because they developed over decades, or centuries, during different political flashpoints, but the traditional ones had more generalized restrictions and used language like ‘nonresident alien.’” 

Brown says recently passed state laws are more likely to be focused on restricting China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, which he calls “The Big Four.” 

There have been several efforts on a federal level to pass a law restricting foreign ownership of American land, many specifically focused on The Big Four, but nothing has passed to date. However, the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act requires foreign investors to disclose details about their holdings to USDA. Also, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States helps the president review foreign investments and acquisitions of American companies and real estate and determine whether a transaction presents a threat to U.S. national security.

A bit of perspective

Steve Bruere, CEO of Peoples Co., says foreign ownership of American farmland is a hot-button topic for many and as a former farm kid he understands the knee-jerk desire for American farmland to be owned by American farmers. However, he also says there are other facets to consider. 

When it comes to selling land, he notes, most clients will want the best price they can get for the sale and wouldn’t want a law interfering with who could purchase the land. Furthermore, he says U.S. citizens often invest in other countries and “it’s hard to have it both ways.” 

“Depending on which hat I want to wear, I have mixed emotions about it,” he says. “But when you get right down to it, it’s a nonevent.… The food security argument is a challenge; it’s not economically feasible to produce commodities on relatively small acreages in the middle of the U.S. and create a supply chain for those products to get back across an ocean. I can tell you with absolute certainty, I’ve never in 20 years had a transaction that involved Russia or China for instance. We handle a significant amount of volume of transactions around the country. I’m going to say the issue is getting more attention during the current political cycle than is probably warranted.” 

Suzanne Shirbroun, a farmer from Clayton County, Iowa, and president of the Iowa Soybean Association, says it’s important to consider the issue on a case-by-case basis. 

“We need to be diligent with our concerns, but also, we have to maintain that these countries are also purchasing our products,” she says. “The U.S. soybean farmer spent 40 years developing the Chinese markets, and now they’re the world’s largest importer of soybeans…. So, we have to be careful and make sure that our policies don’t limit our soybean market access or industry research…. We’ve got to protect our national security. We need to protect our farmers, but we need to be able to keep trade open.”