Foreign investors own more farmland acres in the U.S. than there are total acres in the state of Georgia, according to a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The analysis, which is based on 2021 USDA data, says about 3.1% of all U.S. farmland, or about 40.83 million acres, is owned by foreign investors; Georgia has about 38 million acres.
Canadian investors top the list, or 12.8 million acres, roughly 31% of the foreign-owned agricultural land in the U.S. No other country’s investors combine to own more than 5 million acres of American farmland.
Some 52% of the reported foreign-owned acreage is owned by limited liability companies (LLCs), 32% is held by corporations, and 12% by partnerships. The remaining 2.3% is divided among individuals, trusts, estates, institutions, and associations.
Some 79% of 3,142 U.S. counties have foreign investors, with 65% of them owning between 1 and 19,999 acres. Only 0.01% (18 counties) have more than 200,000 acres owned by foreign investors, with the top four all in northern Maine. More than 20% of Maine's privately held agricultural land is owned by foreign investors, while 9.2% of Hawaii's privately held agricultural land is in foreign hands.
In 2021, nearly half (48%) the country's foreign-owned agricultural land was forestland, totaling 19.2 million acres. Most of the remaining acreage was split between two categories: cropland (11.8 million acres, 29% of the total) and 18% pastureland (7.3 million acres, 18%).
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The states with the most significant increases in foreign-held agricultural land from 2020 to 2021 were Texas (up by 549,000 acres), Arkansas (up by 250,000 acres), and North Carolina (up by 247,000 acres). Conversely, Hawaii, Iowa and Utah saw decreases in foreign-held land; declines there totaling 52,000 acres were mainly due to the termination of long-term leaseholds and land sales.
While there has been significant attention on foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land, particularly by Chinese entities, the most recent AFIDA data indicates that China ranks 18th in U.S. agricultural land ownership, holding 383,000 acres. This amounts to less than 1% of all foreign-owned U.S. agricultural land or just .0003% of the total agricultural land in the United States.
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