The Daily Dirt — Morning Edition
Your morning rundown on the fight for American farmland: foreign ownership, the FTC's Deere lawsuit, and the debt clock ticking under farm country.
- Foreign investors hold ~45 million acres of US farmland — and the federal database meant to track it is, per the GAO, a mess.
- The FTC's right-to-repair lawsuit against John Deere is the biggest ag-monopoly fight on the board. Deere denies wrongdoing.
- Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies are the canary: low for now, but rising costs and pricier debt are loading the spring.
- Four packers slaughter ~85% of US beef. Ranchers say that's why beef is sky-high but raising cattle still loses money.
- Maine banned PFAS sludge on farmland in 2022. The contamination is almost certainly national — most states just haven't looked.
- Land trusts are quietly the most effective tool young farmers have to beat the investor price trap.
Good morning from the desk. Here’s the dirt before your coffee gets cold.
The thread tying today together is ownership — who holds the land, who holds the tools, and who holds the leverage. Start with the dirt itself: foreign and institutional money keeps flowing into US farmland, and the systems meant to track it are either broken (the GAO’s verdict on USDA’s foreign-ownership database) or simply absent (there’s no clean registry of how much land pension funds and PE firms control). You can’t regulate what you refuse to count.
Then there’s the tools. The FTC’s lawsuit against John Deere is bigger than tractors — it’s a test of whether you actually own the six-figure machine in your shed, or just license it on the manufacturer’s terms. Deere says the suit is meritless. Farmers staring at a dead combine during a closing weather window say otherwise.
Underneath all of it: the debt clock. Bankruptcies are low right now, but that’s a lagging signal cushioned by high land values and years of federal support. Costs are up, rates bit hard, and farm income came off its highs. The vise is tightening quietly.
It’s not all funeral, though. The afternoon’s reporting digs into the people fighting back — ranchers suing the meatpackers, young farmers using land trusts to beat the investor price trap, soil getting rebuilt one cover crop at a time. We’ll have the Evening Edition after the dust settles. Stay on the land.