Senate Farm Bill 2.0 Targets Foreign Farmland Disclosure

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.) released the text of the Agricultural Act of 2026 on June 23 — a 902-page discussion draft that includes language to modernize and strengthen the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, the four-decade-old federal law requiring foreign buyers to report U.S. farmland acquisitions. The committee plans to hold markup in July.

The release marks the first time the full legislative text of the so-called Farm Bill 2.0 has been available for public review. Boozman said the bill reflects bipartisan input and is designed to “strengthen the American farm economy, increase investments for rural communities and foster a more resilient agricultural sector.”

AFIDA provisions in the bill

The AFIDA language in the Agricultural Act of 2026 would modernize and strengthen reporting requirements under the existing disclosure framework and bolsters USDA’s Office of Homeland Security — the USDA component responsible for coordinating national security-related review of foreign agricultural investments. The bill incorporates elements of bipartisan legislation championed by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), which has focused specifically on improving federal capacity to track foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land.

Grassley and Baldwin have been among the most persistent voices on Capitol Hill pushing for stiffer AFIDA enforcement. Their legislative framework targets the gaps that have made AFIDA’s annual disclosures an imprecise floor rather than a complete picture of foreign agricultural land interest in the United States.

What AFIDA currently does — and doesn’t do

AFIDA, 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 of a qualifying transaction. The requirement applies to farmland, ranchland, and forestland exceeding 10 acres, or any transaction valued above $1,000.

The law does not restrict or prohibit those purchases — it only requires notification after the fact.

As of the most recent full-year USDA data, foreign persons held an interest in roughly 43.4 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, representing approximately 1.8 percent of all privately held U.S. agricultural land. The largest foreign holders by acreage are Canadian investors, followed by interests from the Netherlands and other European countries. That context matters: the political debate has centered heavily on Chinese investment, but China-linked entities hold a comparatively small share of total foreign-held acreage — though strategically located acquisitions near military installations have driven national security concerns.

The Government Accountability Office has flagged serious concerns about AFIDA data quality in prior reviews, noting that late filings, underreporting, and inconsistent enforcement leave the public totals unreliable. A buyer who routes a farmland purchase through a domestic limited liability company may not trigger reporting requirements at all, depending on the transaction structure — a well-documented shell-company gap that neither USDA nor Congress has yet closed.

A wave of state-level foreign land ownership bans has tried to compensate for federal inaction, but those laws vary dramatically in scope and are unenforceable against the ownership-chain opacity that the LLC loophole enables. Farm Bill 2.0’s AFIDA provisions would, if enacted, work at the federal level where state bans cannot reach.

The broader land-access context

The foreign ownership debate does not exist in isolation. Nearly 15 percent of American cropland is projected to change hands in the next three years as aging farm operators retire without identified successors — a consolidation wave that poses direct threats to family farm survival regardless of who the buyers are.

Institutional investors — private equity, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts currently hold a far larger share of U.S. agricultural land than all foreign investors combined and are aggressively competing for incoming acreage. Critics of the AFIDA-centric legislative focus argue that tighter foreign disclosure rules, while worth doing, address a fraction of the land concentration problem while leaving domestic institutional acquisition entirely untouched.

The National Farmers Union and Food & Water Watch have both called for broader land transparency measures that cover institutional domestic buyers, not just foreign ones. Neither version of that argument appears in the current Farm Bill 2.0 draft’s scope.

What markup in July could decide

The committee’s July markup will be the first real legislative test of the bill’s AFIDA provisions and the broader foreign land title. Discussion drafts routinely change in markup; the Grassley-Baldwin elements could be strengthened, weakened, or stripped in amendments.

Key questions heading into markup: whether beneficial ownership disclosure requirements will be added to close the LLC loophole; whether USDA’s enforcement capacity will be funded at a level that makes stiffer penalties meaningful; and whether the bipartisan national security framing can hold together enough votes to survive a House conference later in the year.

For farmers and advocates who have been pushing AFIDA reform for years, the release of Farm Bill 2.0 text is a genuine step forward — a 48-year-old disclosure law written for a different era of agricultural finance is overdue for an update. Whether the final bill makes the reporting regime meaningfully harder to dodge is a question July markup will begin to answer.