News

Slotkin says tax policy should consider farmland as a national security asset

A member of the U.S. Senate Ag Committee says there needs to be better protections to keep farmland in production.

Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin tells Brownfield, “The only way to make sure we can always feed ourselves by ourselves is by having enough agricultural land to grow the food.”

“I’m a big believer we need to be thinking of our land, our agricultural land as a national security asset,” she says.

She says Congress has made strides in restricting foreign ownership through the FARMLAND Act, but more needs to be done to encourage ag land to stay in the hands of active farmers.

“Even though I want to sell to a farmer, you’re incentivized to sell to a developer,” she says. “If there was a tax policy that actually supported selling to another new young farmer, that would seriously incentivize many farming families to sell to another farmer.”

Slotkin says she’s interested in seeing Senator Mitch McConnell’s Protecting American Farmlands Act supported through the farm bill.

“We can’t just decide as a country it’s okay to develop every acre of land and not leave ourselves the ability to grow our own food,” she says.

The legislation has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee and is backed by the Kentucky Farm Bureau and Kentucky Farmland Transition Initiative Network.