Sarah Melotte for The Daily Yonder

Why do foreign investors buy American farmland?

Foreign investors own almost 46 million acres of farm land in the United States, according to data from the 1978 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) , a federal law meant to track international interest in American land. Foreign-owned farmland had a total estimated value of $82.6 billion in 2023, the last year of available data, the The Daily Yonder reports.

Enjoying your free access? Help support the local journalism you love. Subscribe

Readers should note that AFIDA data doesn’t always accurately reflect the current value of a tract of farmland. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, USDA employees make manual mistakes while entering data. Other times, the value o

See Full Page