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A closer look at foreign ag land ownership in United States

A recent USDA report says foreign-owned ag land in the United States increased slightly in 2022.

Danny Munch, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, says the biggest increases happened in forestland across Alabama, Michigan and portions of Colorado.

“In Colorado, that was mainly pastureland and cropland,” he says. “And there were some states in 2022 that actually saw declines in foreign ag land ownership including Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon and Vermont.”

He says Canada continued to own the most U.S. ag land, followed by the Netherlands. And Munch says while China gets a lot of attention, the country owned less than 1% of U.S. farmland in 2022.

“In the recent report, we saw that Chinese investor-owned acreage actually declined between 2021 and 2022,” he says. “They estimated 383,000 acres were reported in 2021, which is about the average size of a county in Ohio and USDA says at the end of 2022, Chinese investor filers reported owning more than 349,000 acres of ag land.”

Munch says the report helps paint a clearer picture of foreign-owned ag land in the United States, but USDA needs improved data gathering as interest builds on the topic. Farm Bureau members will consider foreign ag land ownership policy at the upcoming annual meeting.

“The policy recommendation that made it through the first step in the process is that we support better funding and enforcement under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act to make sure farmers have a better picture of what’s going on.”

The American Farm Bureau Federation will have their annual meeting in Utah the week of January 22.