The Nebraska Legislature’s Agricultural Committee last month held an interim study hearing on the foreign ownership of agricultural land in Nebraska. According to the Nebraska Examiner, Chair of the Committee, Sen. Steve Halloran, said constituent concerns and Chinese interest in U.S. farmland spurred him and other senators to undertake the study. A Tidbits article last fall highlighted a USDA Farm Service Agency report on foreign holdings of agricultural land. Just over 691,000 acres of private agricultural land in Nebraska are foreign-owned, or 1.5 percent of the state’s 45.5 million privately owned acres. Nearly 73 percent of the foreign-held acres are owned by Canadian investors. Italians follow with 21 percent. Antelope County has the most foreign-owned acres with 253,000 acres, roughly 36 percent the state’s foreign-owned land.
Nationwide, over 40 million acres of farm ground is foreign-owned, or 3 percent of privately owned farmland. Figure 3 shows the distribution of acres by owners’ country of origin. Canadian investors own the most land, followed by the Netherlands and Italy. Investors from China are near the bottom of the list, owning the equivalent of 0.03 percent of U.S agricultural land. Figure 4 shows a visualization of foreign-owned land with the shaded counties symbolizing equivalent acreages of foreign-owned agricultural land by nationality. The shaded counties do not indicate the location of the land.
The investment in farmland is just part of the investment flows between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Dr. Larry Van Tassell, professor and director of the Center for Agricultural Profitability at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says U.S. companies and individuals had $6.58 trillion invested in other countries at the end of 2022, including ownership of over nine million acres of land. Foreign investment in the U.S. was $5.25 trillion, with most of it concentrated in manufacturing, insurance, and wholesale trade industries.
Source: nefb.org
Photo Credit: usda
Categories: Nebraska, General