Who Really Owns American Farmland? The Paper Trail Nobody Wants You to Follow

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about American dirt: a lot of it isn’t owned by Americans, and the people who are supposed to be keeping track admit they’re doing a bad job of it.

As of the most recent USDA reporting, foreign persons and entities held an interest in roughly 45 million acres of US agricultural land — somewhere around 3.4% of all privately held farmland and forest. That’s an area bigger than the state of Iowa. The number has climbed for years.

The law that’s supposed to keep tabs on this is the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA), passed in 1978. On paper, any foreign person who buys or sells US farmland has to file a disclosure with USDA. In practice, the system leaks like a rusted-out irrigation pipe.

The watchdog that can’t see

In 2024, the Government Accountability Office — Congress’s own auditor — took a hard look at how USDA runs AFIDA and came back with a verdict that should embarrass everyone involved. The GAO found the data was incomplete, riddled with errors, and slow to be processed. Filings sat in paper form. Acreage got double-counted. USDA couldn’t reliably tell Congress, or you, who owned what.

Read the GAO report and the picture is bleak: the database that’s supposed to be America’s early-warning system for foreign land acquisition is closer to a shoebox of receipts.

That matters because the AFIDA data is the foundation for nearly every policy fight happening in statehouses right now. When a legislator stands up to ban Chinese or Saudi land purchases, the number they’re citing traces back to this same shaky federal ledger.

Who’s actually buying

Strip away the panic-headlines and the real ownership picture is more complicated than “China is buying the farm.” According to USDA’s own AFIDA breakdowns, the largest foreign holders of US agricultural land are investors from Canada, followed by the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Canadian holdings alone dwarf Chinese ones.

China’s footprint is real but comparatively small — a fraction of one percent of foreign-held acreage. What set off the political firestorm wasn’t the acreage; it was location. A Chinese-linked company’s purchase of land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota turned farmland ownership into a national-security story, as Reuters reported when the deal collapsed under federal and local pressure.

But here’s the part the cable-news version skips: a huge and growing share of foreign-held land isn’t cropland at all. It’s wind and solar leases and timberland. European energy firms signing long-term leases for turbine sites show up in the same database as a hedge fund buying row crops. The “land grab” is real, but it doesn’t always look like the picture in your head.

The shell-company problem

The deeper rot is structural. AFIDA tracks foreign ownership, but it has almost nothing to say about who controls land when the buyer is a US-registered LLC funded by foreign or institutional money.

Set up a Delaware shell, route the capital through it, and on paper the buyer is as American as a county fair. The disclosure obligation gets murky fast, and enforcement is thin: USDA’s penalties for late or false AFIDA filings have historically been small enough to treat as a rounding error. Investigate Midwest has documented for years how opaque ownership structures make it nearly impossible to follow farmland money to its source.

This is the loophole that swallows the law. You can ban “foreign” purchases all you want; if the capital wears an American costume, your ban never sees it.

What’s actually being done

The momentum is in the states. As of 2025, more than 20 states have passed or tightened laws restricting foreign — and in some cases specifically adversarial-nation — ownership of agricultural land, according to tracking by the National Agricultural Law Center. The patchwork is messy, sometimes constitutionally shaky, and wildly inconsistent state to state.

At the federal level, proposals keep surfacing to put the Secretary of Agriculture on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — the panel that reviews deals for national-security risk — so that farmland gets the same scrutiny as a semiconductor plant. So far, those proposals keep stalling.

Why you should care even if you’ll never own an acre

When farmland becomes a financial instrument — a yield play for pension funds, sovereign wealth, and PE roll-ups — the people who lose are the ones trying to farm it. Investor capital bids land prices into the stratosphere. Young farmers can’t compete with a fund that doesn’t need the dirt to pencil out as a farm, only as an asset.

Average US cropland values have roughly doubled over the past decade, USDA data shows. Some of that is good old-fashioned demand. A meaningful chunk is money looking for somewhere safe to sit.

The land grab isn’t a single villain in a black hat. It’s a system — a broken database, a loophole-riddled disclosure law, and a flood of capital that treats the ground your food grows in as a spreadsheet cell.

Follow the paper trail. Then ask why it’s so hard to follow.

Save US Farms is tracking foreign and corporate farmland acquisitions in the War Room. Got a deed, a shell company, or a tip? Our desk reads everything.