Early in the summer of 2018, a nonprofit few Nebraskans have heard of bought a 22,613-acre chunk of land in Garden County.
The next year, the nonprofit, tied to a P.O. Box in Salt Lake City, picked up another 3,331 acres of county land, buying it from a Colorado investment company.
The unknown nonprofit grabbed two more pieces of county land on the same day in March 2020, adding 10,278 acres to its mushrooming total. Then, two years later, it added still more land in this rural Nebraska county tucked between Chimney Rock and Lake McConaughy.
Before anyone really knew it, the nonprofit owned most of northern Garden County.
Not even the assessor could calculate the nonprofit’s total acres, an employee in the Garden County Assessor’s Office said. The organization simply owns too many parcels, through too many sales, for county officials to comb through the records.
“You’ll have to ask Farmland Reserve Inc.,” she said politely before hanging up the phone.
Farmland Reserve Inc., a nonprofit owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, has been quietly buying up ranch land in Nebraska’s Sandhills for the past three decades.
The Garden County shopping spree, coupled with more buys in four neighboring counties, made the church Nebraska’s top single buyer of land in the past five years.
The church bought a whopping 57,500 acres – double the amount of the second largest buyer– between 2018 and 2022, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of data gathered by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications data journalism class.
Source: investigatemidwest.org
Photo Credit: gettyimages-steve-baccon
Categories: Nebraska, General