Disclosure Isn't Enough: The Push to Close the Farmland Loophole

The federal government has required foreign buyers to disclose purchases of U.S. agricultural land since 1978. Nearly five decades later, a mounting number of state legislatures have reached the same conclusion: disclosure is not the same as protection.

The result is a patchwork of state-level foreign farmland ownership restrictions that varies dramatically by state, targets different “countries of concern,” and leaves unresolved a harder question — whether the real threat to family farm ownership is foreign investment specifically, or the broader wave of institutional capital that has been rolling up agricultural land for years regardless of where the money originates.

What AFIDA does and doesn’t do

The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, enacted in 1978, requires any foreign person or entity that acquires, transfers, or holds an interest in U.S. agricultural land to file a report with USDA’s Farm Service Agency within 90 days. The requirement applies to farmland, ranch land, and forestland exceeding 10 acres, or any transaction valued above $1,000.

What the law does not do is restrict or prohibit those purchases. A foreign investor who files the required disclosure report faces no additional statutory barrier to completing the acquisition.

USDA’s Farm Service Agency publishes annual reports to Congress compiling disclosed foreign agricultural land holdings. The most recently available full-year data showed that foreign persons held an interest in approximately 43.4 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of the end of 2022 — roughly 1.8 percent of all privately held U.S. agricultural land.

The largest foreign holder by acreage is Canada, followed by investors from the Netherlands and other European countries. China, while politically prominent in the debate, held a comparatively small share of total foreign-held acreage as of recent USDA figures — though politically connected Chinese acquisitions near military installations drew the most sustained attention.

GAO has flagged concerns about AFIDA data quality in prior reviews, noting that late filings, underreporting, and inconsistent enforcement make USDA’s figures an imprecise floor rather than a complete accounting of foreign agricultural land interest in the United States.

The state legislative wave

Beginning in earnest in 2023, a wave of state legislatures moved to fill the gap that federal law left open, passing restrictions that go beyond disclosure to outright prohibition. The political focus has largely been on citizens and government-linked entities from a defined list of adversary nations — with China consistently at the center.

Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Iowa were among the states that enacted foreign agricultural land ownership restrictions in 2023. The statutes vary in scope and mechanism: some bar purchases outright within certain distances of military installations, others restrict government-entity acquisitions broadly, and others require existing foreign holders to divest within a set period.

Florida’s SB 264, signed into law in May 2023, applied specifically to nationals of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria — prohibiting those individuals and state-linked entities from purchasing agricultural land in the state. The law has faced legal challenges on equal protection grounds, with courts examining whether nationality-based property restrictions pass constitutional muster.

The Chinese agricultural company Fufeng Group’s 2022 purchase of land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota — a transaction that drew national security scrutiny and was ultimately walked back after federal intervention — became a focal point of the legislative push. Military proximity remains a consistent thread across state legislation, even though the broader concern driving much of the advocacy is competitive land access for American farm families, not proximity to runways.

The harder question

The legislative energy around foreign land ownership is real. Whether it is proportionate to the actual problem — or addresses the right problem — is a genuine debate among agricultural economists and farmer advocates.

USDA ERS data consistently shows that domestic institutional investors — private equity firms, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts — hold a far larger share of U.S. agricultural land than all foreign investors combined. The concentration of farmland ownership among institutional and corporate buyers has pushed cash rents higher across the Corn Belt and Great Plains while squeezing out younger farmers who need to buy or rent land to start operations.

Data centers and utility-scale solar developers are converting prime agricultural acres at a pace that dwarfs most foreign acquisitions — permanently removing productive land from agricultural use. None of the state foreign land bans address any of that.

The National Farmers Union has called for stronger AFIDA enforcement alongside tougher restrictions on all large-scale institutional land speculation, not just foreign. Food & Water Watch has made a similar argument: that carving out “foreign” as a special category misses most of the displacement actually happening to family farms, which comes overwhelmingly from domestic institutional players.

The family farm debt crisis deepening through 2025 and into 2026 is inseparable from the land ownership question — operations that rent ground from institutional landlords face climbing lease costs on top of commodity price declines, and the exit path often runs straight to a sale that adds more acres to corporate portfolios.

Enforcement remains the gap

Even where prohibitions exist, enforcement is inconsistent. AFIDA’s civil penalty structure has never generated significant compliance pressure on foreign buyers who miss or skip the reporting requirement. State agencies have limited capacity to track ownership chains through multi-layered corporate structures — the kind of shell-company arrangements that regularly obscure the beneficial owners of agricultural land from public view.

A buyer who routes a farmland purchase through a domestic limited liability company — a common real estate structure — may not trigger AFIDA reporting requirements at all, depending on how the transaction is structured. That gap is documented and widely acknowledged; it has not been closed.

What to watch

Several farm-state congressional delegations have pushed for AFIDA amendments that would strengthen penalties, mandate beneficial ownership disclosure, and give USDA explicit authority to block purchases from entities linked to foreign government control. Whether any of that passes depends on the same farm bill and appropriations dynamics that have stalled nearly every other agricultural policy priority for the past several years.

For now, foreign agricultural land investment is more visible than it was five years ago — and more legally restricted in some states. But the enforcement gap at the federal level remains open, the shell-company problem is unresolved, and the domestic institutional land concentration that threatens family farm succession sits entirely outside the scope of any state foreign land ban.

Forty-six years into a disclosure law, disclosure is still not enough. And for the family farms losing ground to capital from any direction, the nationality of the buyer matters less than the foreclosure notice in the mailbox.