America's Biggest Pork Producer Is Chinese-Owned — and It Sits on a Lot of US Land

When people argue about foreign ownership of American agriculture, one deal keeps coming up — because it’s the single biggest example on the board, and it already happened.

Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the United States, has been owned by a Chinese company since 2013. That year, Hong Kong–based WH Group (then called Shuanghui International) bought Smithfield for roughly $4.7 billion — at the time the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of a US company. The deal didn’t just hand over a brand. It handed over hog operations, processing plants, and the farmland and contracts that feed them.

Why this is the case everyone cites

The Smithfield purchase cleared CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — the federal panel that screens foreign deals for national-security risk. As the AP and other outlets reported at the time, the review went through despite objections from members of Congress worried about food security and foreign control of the US food supply.

That approval is exactly why the deal still echoes through today’s farmland fights. Critics point to it and ask a simple question: if the single largest chunk of America’s pork supply chain can pass into foreign hands with a green light, what’s the system actually protecting?

It’s also the case that exposed a gap. At the time of the Smithfield deal, the Secretary of Agriculture didn’t sit on CFIUS. Food and farmland weren’t formally treated as a national-security category. Proposals to change that — to put USDA at the CFIUS table — have surfaced repeatedly since, and keep stalling in Congress.

The land underneath

The headline was the pork. The quieter story is the dirt. Smithfield’s operations are tied to large tracts of agricultural land and a vast network of contract growers, concentrated heavily in states like North Carolina, Missouri, and Virginia.

That makes the company a recurring flashpoint in state-level fights over foreign farmland ownership. As Reuters has reported, Missouri lawmakers have repeatedly grappled with foreign-ownership rules in the shadow of Smithfield’s footprint there — a reminder that these laws often get written with one specific company in mind.

The environmental ledger

You can’t talk about Smithfield’s land without talking about what sits on it. The company’s hog operations — especially in eastern North Carolina — have been at the center of years of litigation over manure lagoons, odor, and water pollution affecting the mostly rural, often Black and low-income communities living nearby. Juries have awarded damages to neighbors in nuisance suits; the cases were widely covered by Civil Eats and national outlets.

So the foreign-ownership question stacks on top of an environmental-justice question. It’s not just who owns the land — it’s what’s being done to the people who live next to it.

What it means now

Here’s the honest framing, because the politics around this get hot fast. China’s overall share of US farmland is small — well under one percent of foreign-held acreage, per USDA’s AFIDA data. The Smithfield deal isn’t proof that “China is buying up America’s farms.” Most foreign farmland is held by Canadian and European investors.

But Smithfield is proof of something narrower and arguably scarier: that a single foreign acquisition can capture a strategic node of the food system — not just acres, but the processing, the supply contracts, the market power — and that the federal screening process at the time waved it through.

That’s the lesson the land-grab beat keeps returning to. The threat to American food sovereignty isn’t always a fund quietly buying 5,000 acres. Sometimes it’s one $4.7 billion handshake that reshapes an entire protein supply chain in an afternoon — and the regulators decide it’s fine.

Save US Farms tracks foreign and corporate control of the food system in the War Room. This deal is one we keep on the board.