7 ms·

'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned

113 points by drocer88 7y ago

lettergram 7y ago
There's approximately 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., so 30 million acres is around 3%[1]. Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
- mc32 7y ago
  True, though in Calif some foreign owners bought land with water rights to grow high water consuming but high cash yielding crops. Then again, I think Harvard did similar. Plus it’s not the same as what China is doing in east Africa as it pertains farmland since some of that is tied into deals more or less obligating the countries to comply.
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    Does it matter that they are foreign owners? Would any of this be better if the owners happened to be US citizens?
    - namibj 7y ago
      Fun fact: it would be trivially cheap for the population to pay those crop growers off to make it economically infeasible for them to grow. Just pay them their profits + 1% and you're done. It's _really_ not that much, and easier/cheaper than residential water conservation (which doesn't really matter anyways).
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        The real cost isn't in the money needed to pay off farmers to not grow things, it's to the consumers that won't have their favorite foods available. Americans love their corn, rice, beef, almonds, pistachios, and avocados, all of which are very water-intensive crops. The high agricultural water consumption is basically consumers saying "I value my beef more than my lawn", which is pretty accurate. We hear about residential water conservation (which, as you mention, is a literal drop in the bucket) because nobody's seriously suggesting banning meat, but given the choice between water shortages (as long as it doesn't get to the point where drinking water is endangered) or going without favorite foods, most people would take the water shortages. Chances are, even a significant portion of vegans would rather go with the water shortage if everyone was a vegan and it was no longer an effective way to signal cultural values.
        asdff 7y ago
        Yet you can do without almonds, pistachios, avocados, etc. and I bet no one will miss it. The only reason why people like these things is that they are cheap, available in every supermarket, and normalized as a food choice by advertising. Remove the subsidy and watch the market evaporate, because no one in the world likes avocados enough to pay $10 each. American interests aren't created by individual preferences, but advertising from entrenched corporations that shift real interests, like having food, into more profitable interests, like buying almonds.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Only if you believe in sovereignty, and want the best deal for your country and its citizens first and foremost.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        Sure, but then why should any other country not retaliate on America? The great achievement of globalisation was levelling out a rights-based system between countries so that we could invest over there and in return they could invest over here. "Americans have special rights in America, but your country has to grant Americans a fair playing field versus your own citizens" is colonialism, and one step down from banana republics (where Americans had superior property rights to non-Americans in Honduras)
        coldtea 7y ago
        >Sure, but then why should any other country not retaliate on America? The great achievement of globalisation was levelling out a rights-based system between countries so that we could invest over there and in return they could invest over here. I thought the great achievement of globalization was furthering Raegan's/Thacher's neoliberal agenda, turning industrial jobs into a race for the bottom where the global lowest wage bidder wins, and undoing a century of labor protections and working/middle class safety nets -- all the while destroying the planet with increased BS trade. >"Americans have special rights in America, but your country has to grant Americans a fair playing field versus your own citizens" Who said other countries have to do that? Other countries should prioritize their own citizen's well being too.
- analyst74 7y ago
  yeah, when ww2 happened, lands owned by Japanese Americans who are actually citizens mostly got auctioned off for pennies. Foreigners are gonna get even less protection when shit hits the fan.
- gingabriska 7y ago
  It will have a domino effect. Who will trust US government then? Who will use US dollar and invest in US treasury bill and securities?
  - reallydude 7y ago
    > It will have a domino effect. That is conjecture. Land grabs happen all over the world in a varied number of scenarios without destabilizing economies. Securities each have their own markets, but let's focus on the mortgage bonds. How the US govt deals with the owenership of real estate is not directly tied to mortgage bonds on those properties, as long as the interest continues to be paid out or off. Eminent domain is a power and I'm not sure how it's use affects these bonds directly without provisions about dissolving them. In such a bold move, it's presumptuous to assume the federal govt wouldn't know the consequences beforehand (eg bank bailouts).
    - gingabriska 7y ago
      >Land grabs happen all over the world in a varied number of scenarios without destabilizing economies US is different, here private property rights are part of the constitution and can't be taken away for social good like in some European countries. Constitution is like a set of beliefs, if beliefs are changed, suddenly country loses its identity as beliefs are inherent part of it and then people will have hard time trusting new country.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        > US is different, here private property rights are part of the constitution and can't be taken away for social good like in some European countries. That's... not at all true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_S... Hell, it doesn't even need to be for social good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
  - derp_dee_derp 7y ago
- nostrademons 7y ago
  "Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one." I've wondered about this for a while. On one hand, owning investments on foreign soil seems super risky when shit hits the fan, because you depend upon friendly relations with the legal system of the foreign country to enforce your property rights. If it really comes down to "Americans are going hungry and homeless because Chinese are speculating on real estate", don't you think they're going to kick the Chinese out regardless of what the deed says? OTOH, the scale of interconnectedness across the globe seems to create a very large market for private non-national security companies. It's not just Chinese in America - as the article noted, it's Americans in a wide variety of other countries, as well as corporations owning factories and having whole supply chains across the globe. If shit hits the fan there will be a lot of money seeking mercenaries, private armies, and independent defense contractors to enforce their property rights globally.
  - drjesusphd 7y ago
    This is why trade is such a strong force for peace. You get many powerful people on both sides invested in maintaining good relations between nations. It's also a marker for said peace. If there's a lot of trade already, many others will feel comfortable participating because the market has indicated that investing in the relationship is not terribly risky.
  - TomMckenny 7y ago
    But there are already a great many homeless and not the slightest move has been made in this direction. Perhaps there just aren't enough yet. If the nation is run by its people then what you describe would indeed happen. If it is run by a small cadre of wealthy then they would invite investment world wide to maximally drive up land values regardless of homeless numbers. Indeed there would be extreme reluctance as any seizure or even hint of it would permanently reduce land values. Perhaps we'll see which is the case.
    - badpun 7y ago
      Regarding homeless - there's a great youtube channel where a guy does long interviews with homeless people (unfortunately available in Polish only), and they basically say that, for them, consistently getting up early, commuting to job, working hard for 8+ hours (while being sober) is just more of a hassle than living on a street. There will always be people like that and the only way to not have homeless at all is to give people everything they need for free (UBI).
duxup 7y ago
Didn't we go through a period worrying about this (non farm land that time) with the Japanese? Didn't work out for them...
mdorazio 7y ago
Some weird cognitive dissonance here. On one hand farmers are concerned that companies buying up land to use for windfarms means the land is no longer used for food. But we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays farmers not to sell it... and taking farmland out of production would theoretically increase crop prices for everyone else. As the article points out, farmers are retiring and their families don't want to run the farms anymore, so someone needs to buy it. Your choices are generally going to be either a mega farming corp or investors.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That’s grain products, especially Corn This is something to worry about as our economic policy is finishing off whatever is left of the small farmer. Concentration of food production resources is an obviously bad thing that will be harmful to the country in the future. Particularly obvious which vegetables and berries, where a few dozen entities in 2-3 California counties essentially make the market. In the meantime, the former seasonal prime growing areas in places like New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts for these crops are now subdivisions. So when climate change makes irrigating the Imperial Valley less fruitful, we’ll have permanently lost that capacity.
  - digitalsushi 7y ago
    https://www.foodsolutionsne.org/sites/default/files/LowResNEFV_0.pdf https://www.foodsolutionsne.org/sites/default/files/LowResNE...
- gpm 7y ago
  > we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays farmers not to sell it This strikes me as the ideal state of affairs, if we don't overproduce food a below average crop would mean people starving.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It's not, as we aren't even producing useful crops in many places. In the central valley there are lots of almond and cotton farmers with outsized political sway, for example. These are water intensive crops that we actively subsidize and allow to freely pollute, but do we really need to waste all of this water and subsidy and taint the water supply for airline snacks and mattress-stuffing-grade cotton?
klipt 7y ago
How much land do American citizens own outside the US? Probably a lot more than non-Americans own in the US?
newhotelowner 7y ago
I want to buy a few acres of farmland, but either it's too expensive or its in remote location.
- k_sh 7y ago
  > too expensive or its in remote location This is generally how land values work...
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Generally....how much has "too" varied over time though? Was it as relatively expensive for an middle to upper middle class person to pick up a few acres 30 years ago as it is now? I've heard more than one farmer say you have to operate at very large scales to justify current farm prices, but I have no idea how true that is (and of course, it varies by region).
    - k_sh 7y ago
      > how much has "too" varied over time though? Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs the Southeast). [0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-value/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...
    - froindt 7y ago
      We had a centennial farm in my family until about 8 years ago. In the day it was pretty good size, but it didn't expand for many years. Farm land goes up for sale very infrequently, and the economics of buying land even 10 miles from your main operation get very bad very fast with slow equipment and logistics. Ultimately the farm was too small to be super profitable at about 600 acres (640 in a square mile). It was corn and soybeans, primarily to feed the cattle and hogs. They really couldn't make the economics of splitting between the co-owners, so one bought the other out. The other operations in the area are 1000+ acres, many 2-3000.
yonran 7y ago
Yet another reason for a heavy land value tax: to ensure that the fruits of the land benefit the community even when it has been purchased by a foreign corporation.
Causality1 7y ago
>And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned That's very surprising for a nation that bars foreign-flagged ships from moving cargo between American ports.
- jdhn 7y ago
  The Jones Act should have been repealed a long time ago.
EvagohP5 7y ago
well. taste your own medicine fellas
rchaud 7y ago
No discussion of US farming subsidies that incentivize these kinds of land investments? The land in and of itself isn't worth much more than its lot value, and the Canadians, Chinese and Germans aren't exactly buying all those acres to turn them into parking lots and strip malls.

113 points by drocer88 7y ago

There's approximately 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., so 30 million acres is around 3%[1]. Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one. [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

mc32 7y ago
True, though in Calif some foreign owners bought land with water rights to grow high water consuming but high cash yielding crops. Then again, I think Harvard did similar. Plus it’s not the same as what China is doing in east Africa as it pertains farmland since some of that is tied into deals more or less obligating the countries to comply.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  Does it matter that they are foreign owners? Would any of this be better if the owners happened to be US citizens?
  - namibj 7y ago
    Fun fact: it would be trivially cheap for the population to pay those crop growers off to make it economically infeasible for them to grow. Just pay them their profits + 1% and you're done. It's _really_ not that much, and easier/cheaper than residential water conservation (which doesn't really matter anyways).
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      The real cost isn't in the money needed to pay off farmers to not grow things, it's to the consumers that won't have their favorite foods available. Americans love their corn, rice, beef, almonds, pistachios, and avocados, all of which are very water-intensive crops. The high agricultural water consumption is basically consumers saying "I value my beef more than my lawn", which is pretty accurate. We hear about residential water conservation (which, as you mention, is a literal drop in the bucket) because nobody's seriously suggesting banning meat, but given the choice between water shortages (as long as it doesn't get to the point where drinking water is endangered) or going without favorite foods, most people would take the water shortages. Chances are, even a significant portion of vegans would rather go with the water shortage if everyone was a vegan and it was no longer an effective way to signal cultural values.
      - asdff 7y ago
        Yet you can do without almonds, pistachios, avocados, etc. and I bet no one will miss it. The only reason why people like these things is that they are cheap, available in every supermarket, and normalized as a food choice by advertising. Remove the subsidy and watch the market evaporate, because no one in the world likes avocados enough to pay $10 each. American interests aren't created by individual preferences, but advertising from entrenched corporations that shift real interests, like having food, into more profitable interests, like buying almonds.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Only if you believe in sovereignty, and want the best deal for your country and its citizens first and foremost.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Sure, but then why should any other country not retaliate on America? The great achievement of globalisation was levelling out a rights-based system between countries so that we could invest over there and in return they could invest over here. "Americans have special rights in America, but your country has to grant Americans a fair playing field versus your own citizens" is colonialism, and one step down from banana republics (where Americans had superior property rights to non-Americans in Honduras)
      - coldtea 7y ago
        >Sure, but then why should any other country not retaliate on America? The great achievement of globalisation was levelling out a rights-based system between countries so that we could invest over there and in return they could invest over here. I thought the great achievement of globalization was furthering Raegan's/Thacher's neoliberal agenda, turning industrial jobs into a race for the bottom where the global lowest wage bidder wins, and undoing a century of labor protections and working/middle class safety nets -- all the while destroying the planet with increased BS trade. >"Americans have special rights in America, but your country has to grant Americans a fair playing field versus your own citizens" Who said other countries have to do that? Other countries should prioritize their own citizen's well being too.
analyst74 7y ago
yeah, when ww2 happened, lands owned by Japanese Americans who are actually citizens mostly got auctioned off for pennies. Foreigners are gonna get even less protection when shit hits the fan.
gingabriska 7y ago
It will have a domino effect. Who will trust US government then? Who will use US dollar and invest in US treasury bill and securities?
- reallydude 7y ago
  > It will have a domino effect. That is conjecture. Land grabs happen all over the world in a varied number of scenarios without destabilizing economies. Securities each have their own markets, but let's focus on the mortgage bonds. How the US govt deals with the owenership of real estate is not directly tied to mortgage bonds on those properties, as long as the interest continues to be paid out or off. Eminent domain is a power and I'm not sure how it's use affects these bonds directly without provisions about dissolving them. In such a bold move, it's presumptuous to assume the federal govt wouldn't know the consequences beforehand (eg bank bailouts).
  - gingabriska 7y ago
    >Land grabs happen all over the world in a varied number of scenarios without destabilizing economies US is different, here private property rights are part of the constitution and can't be taken away for social good like in some European countries. Constitution is like a set of beliefs, if beliefs are changed, suddenly country loses its identity as beliefs are inherent part of it and then people will have hard time trusting new country.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > US is different, here private property rights are part of the constitution and can't be taken away for social good like in some European countries. That's... not at all true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_S... Hell, it doesn't even need to be for social good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
- derp_dee_derp 7y ago
nostrademons 7y ago
"Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one." I've wondered about this for a while. On one hand, owning investments on foreign soil seems super risky when shit hits the fan, because you depend upon friendly relations with the legal system of the foreign country to enforce your property rights. If it really comes down to "Americans are going hungry and homeless because Chinese are speculating on real estate", don't you think they're going to kick the Chinese out regardless of what the deed says? OTOH, the scale of interconnectedness across the globe seems to create a very large market for private non-national security companies. It's not just Chinese in America - as the article noted, it's Americans in a wide variety of other countries, as well as corporations owning factories and having whole supply chains across the globe. If shit hits the fan there will be a lot of money seeking mercenaries, private armies, and independent defense contractors to enforce their property rights globally.
- drjesusphd 7y ago
  This is why trade is such a strong force for peace. You get many powerful people on both sides invested in maintaining good relations between nations. It's also a marker for said peace. If there's a lot of trade already, many others will feel comfortable participating because the market has indicated that investing in the relationship is not terribly risky.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  But there are already a great many homeless and not the slightest move has been made in this direction. Perhaps there just aren't enough yet. If the nation is run by its people then what you describe would indeed happen. If it is run by a small cadre of wealthy then they would invite investment world wide to maximally drive up land values regardless of homeless numbers. Indeed there would be extreme reluctance as any seizure or even hint of it would permanently reduce land values. Perhaps we'll see which is the case.
  - badpun 7y ago
    Regarding homeless - there's a great youtube channel where a guy does long interviews with homeless people (unfortunately available in Polish only), and they basically say that, for them, consistently getting up early, commuting to job, working hard for 8+ hours (while being sober) is just more of a hassle than living on a street. There will always be people like that and the only way to not have homeless at all is to give people everything they need for free (UBI).

duxup 7y ago

Didn't we go through a period worrying about this (non farm land that time) with the Japanese? Didn't work out for them...

mdorazio 7y ago

Some weird cognitive dissonance here. On one hand farmers are concerned that companies buying up land to use for windfarms means the land is no longer used for food. But we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays farmers not to sell it... and taking farmland out of production would theoretically increase crop prices for everyone else. As the article points out, farmers are retiring and their families don't want to run the farms anymore, so someone needs to buy it. Your choices are generally going to be either a mega farming corp or investors.

Spooky23 7y ago
That’s grain products, especially Corn This is something to worry about as our economic policy is finishing off whatever is left of the small farmer. Concentration of food production resources is an obviously bad thing that will be harmful to the country in the future. Particularly obvious which vegetables and berries, where a few dozen entities in 2-3 California counties essentially make the market. In the meantime, the former seasonal prime growing areas in places like New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts for these crops are now subdivisions. So when climate change makes irrigating the Imperial Valley less fruitful, we’ll have permanently lost that capacity.
- digitalsushi 7y ago
  https://www.foodsolutionsne.org/sites/default/files/LowResNEFV_0.pdf https://www.foodsolutionsne.org/sites/default/files/LowResNE...
gpm 7y ago
> we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays farmers not to sell it This strikes me as the ideal state of affairs, if we don't overproduce food a below average crop would mean people starving.
- asdff 7y ago
  It's not, as we aren't even producing useful crops in many places. In the central valley there are lots of almond and cotton farmers with outsized political sway, for example. These are water intensive crops that we actively subsidize and allow to freely pollute, but do we really need to waste all of this water and subsidy and taint the water supply for airline snacks and mattress-stuffing-grade cotton?

klipt 7y ago

How much land do American citizens own outside the US? Probably a lot more than non-Americans own in the US?

newhotelowner 7y ago

I want to buy a few acres of farmland, but either it's too expensive or its in remote location.

k_sh 7y ago
> too expensive or its in remote location This is generally how land values work...
- mistermann 7y ago
  Generally....how much has "too" varied over time though? Was it as relatively expensive for an middle to upper middle class person to pick up a few acres 30 years ago as it is now? I've heard more than one farmer say you have to operate at very large scales to justify current farm prices, but I have no idea how true that is (and of course, it varies by region).
  - k_sh 7y ago
    > how much has "too" varied over time though? Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs the Southeast). [0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-value/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...
  - froindt 7y ago
    We had a centennial farm in my family until about 8 years ago. In the day it was pretty good size, but it didn't expand for many years. Farm land goes up for sale very infrequently, and the economics of buying land even 10 miles from your main operation get very bad very fast with slow equipment and logistics. Ultimately the farm was too small to be super profitable at about 600 acres (640 in a square mile). It was corn and soybeans, primarily to feed the cattle and hogs. They really couldn't make the economics of splitting between the co-owners, so one bought the other out. The other operations in the area are 1000+ acres, many 2-3000.

yonran 7y ago

Yet another reason for a heavy land value tax: to ensure that the fruits of the land benefit the community even when it has been purchased by a foreign corporation.

Causality1 7y ago

>And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned That's very surprising for a nation that bars foreign-flagged ships from moving cargo between American ports.

jdhn 7y ago
The Jones Act should have been repealed a long time ago.

EvagohP5 7y ago

well. taste your own medicine fellas

rchaud 7y ago

No discussion of US farming subsidies that incentivize these kinds of land investments? The land in and of itself isn't worth much more than its lot value, and the Canadians, Chinese and Germans aren't exactly buying all those acres to turn them into parking lots and strip malls.