Who Really Owns America's Farmland?

Canada and Europe hold most of America's foreign-held farmland. China holds under 1%. Nearly half of the land is forest, and a big share of the cropland is wind turbine leases, where farming generally carries on under the same operator.

USDA Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) data for holdings at December 31, 2024, the latest year published. Charts use the USDA's record-level file, the same data behind our Foreign-Owned Farmland Map. Sources are at the end.

01Every Foreign-Held Acre, as 1,000 Squares

Start with the whole picture. Foreign investors reported holding 47.2 million acres of U.S. land to the USDA at the end of 2024, counting both land they own and leases of 10 years or more. 46.3 million acres of that is agricultural land, which the USDA puts at 3.6% of all privately held farmland in the country and about 2% of all land. Below, every square is one-thousandth of the total. Tap a country to pick out its squares.

Canada fills 337 of the squares on its own. European countries together fill 471, led by the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. China fills 5. Hong Kong, which the USDA lists separately, adds 3 more, most of it one holding in Nevada. "Everyone else" includes Japan, Mexico, Singapore and about 80 other countries, plus holdings where the investors come from several countries with no main one, and a slice where the filing names no foreign country at all.

02China, Canada and Europe, to Scale

Here are the three side by side, drawn to the same scale. The China bar is not missing. That sliver is all of it.

The trend matters as much as the size. Canada's holdings have more than doubled since 2010, from 7.1 million acres to 15.9 million. Europe's have grown steadily. China's reported holdings peaked in 2021 and have fallen about a third since. Some of that is sales, but some is bookkeeping: the GAO found a large China-linked holding had been counted twice in earlier data, and the USDA has since cleared out outdated records, so a falling line can mean corrections as well as land changing hands. Use the buttons to switch between the three, or show all foreign holdings.

What China actually holds

China's total is small enough that a handful of holders make up most of it. The USDA's report puts it at 247,659 acres of agricultural land at the end of 2024, down from about 383,934 in 2021. (The record-level file our charts use lists 237,152 acres under China; most of the gap is in Florida, where the report counts some holdings the file codes differently.)

Smithfield Foods. The biggest name is Smithfield, the Virginia pork producer that WH Group of Hong Kong bought in 2013 for $4.7 billion. Its hog-farming subsidiary, Murphy-Brown, accounts for about 100,000 acres in North Carolina, Missouri and other states. Smithfield went back to being a public company in 2025, with WH Group keeping control.

Sun Guangxin. A Chinese billionaire whose ranch purchases in Val Verde County, Texas, were reported at about 140,000 acres (his two Texas companies list about 117,000 acres in the 2024 file), near the training airspace of Laughlin Air Force Base, and planned a wind farm there. Texas responded in 2021 with the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, which bars companies tied to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from connecting to the state's power grid, and the wind farm was never built.

Fufeng. The holding that got Washington's attention was a Chinese company's purchase of farmland for a corn mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota, near Grand Forks Air Force Base. In January 2023 the Air Force called the project "a significant threat to national security," and the city killed it. You can see every China and Hong Kong holding by county on the farmland map.

03Fifteen Years of Growth

Foreign holdings have grown almost every year since 2010, from 24.8 million acres to 47.2 million. The interesting part is which kind of land grew. Forest grew slowly. Cropland more than tripled, with most of the jump after 2018, and that is not mainly a story about foreigners buying up corn fields.

The jump in cropland lines up with the wind boom. Wind developers sign long leases with farmers for turbine sites, and a lease of 10 years or more counts as a foreign holding if the developer has foreign investors. The USDA says about 65% of the foreign-held wind lease acreage it tracks was entered in 2015 or later.

04Wind, Timber or Farms?

When people picture foreign-owned farmland, they picture someone buying a family farm. Most of the register looks nothing like that. Here is what the land actually is.

Forest is the biggest piece. 22.2 million acres, about 47% of the total, is forest, much of it timberland held by forestry companies and timber investment funds. Maine is the clearest example: Canadian timber companies hold millions of acres of its North Woods.

Wind leases are the next biggest. The USDA counts about 10.6 million acres tied to wind energy leases, 7.5 million of it cropland and 2.5 million pasture. Less than 1% of that, about 41,000 acres, is owned outright by the wind company. The rest is leasehold: the landowner keeps the land, the USDA says farming generally continues under the same operator, and the developer pays rent for turbine pads and access roads. The USDA finds these holdings by searching filer names for wind energy terms, so treat the figure as a close estimate rather than an exact count. Oklahoma (1.7 million acres), Texas (1.6 million) and Colorado (1.3 million) have the most.

The largest single foreign holder in the whole register is a good example. Invenergy, a Chicago wind and solar developer, is listed under Canada because of its Canadian investor, with about 2.0 million acres in 24 states. That is wind and solar leases, not farms changing hands. If you are wondering what all those wind farms mean for electricity prices, I looked at that in Is AI Raising Your Power Bill?

05The States

Texas has the most foreign-held land, at 5.9 million acres, followed by Maine, Colorado, Alabama and Oklahoma. Measured against each state's privately held farmland, the USDA ranks Maine highest at 21.3%, then Hawaii at 17.1%, Michigan at 8.8%, Louisiana at 8.6% and Washington at 8.3%. Tap any state on the map, or pick it from the list, to see its total, its top countries and how much is held from China and Hong Kong.

06The Biggest Owners

Names make it real. These are the largest foreign holders in the USDA file, by acres. Notice what they are: timber partnerships, wind developers and a life insurer's forestry arm, not farm buyers.

The largest China and Hong Kong holders

Names as filed with the USDA; one company can file under several entities. The country is the one the filing lists for the foreign investor. The Smithfield entities are the pork producer's hog farms; Brazos Highland Properties and Harvest Texas are Sun Guangxin's Texas ranch companies.

07How Big Is It?

Millions of acres are hard to picture, so here is a translator. Pick a country and see its land as a share of familiar places. All foreign holdings together are a little smaller than Nebraska. China's holdings are about a quarter the size of Rhode Island.

08The New State Laws

The numbers may be small, but the politics are not. Since 2023, state after state has passed laws limiting who can buy farmland, most of them aimed at China and other countries the federal government calls foreign adversaries. By the count of the National Agricultural Law Center, 29 states now have a law restricting foreign ownership of agricultural land, and 22 of them passed a new law or tightened an old one in 2023, 2024 or 2025.

The laws vary a lot. Some old ones, like Iowa's and Minnesota's, limit non-resident foreigners in general. The new wave targets specific countries. Florida's 2023 law restricts people and companies domiciled in China. Arkansas used its 2023 law to order Syngenta, the seed company owned by state-run ChemChina, to sell 160 acres and pay a $280,000 fine for filing late. Texas's SB 17, which took effect on September 1, 2025, bars governments, companies and many individuals from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from buying land in the state, with exemptions for U.S. citizens and green-card holders.

The striking thing is the mismatch. Texas has the most China-held land of any state, about 124,000 acres in the USDA's count, and a new law. But plenty of states have passed laws with almost no China-held land to restrict. The laws are about where things might go, not where they are. And national totals only measure scale: the location and use of a particular parcel can matter more for security than any acreage figure, which is exactly what Fufeng showed.

What Washington has done

Military bases. After Grand Forks, the Treasury expanded the reach of CFIUS, the committee that reviews foreign investment for national security, over land near military sites: eight more bases in 2023, Grand Forks Air Force Base among them, and 59 more in a rule that took effect in December 2024. If you are curious which sites are sensitive, our guide to classified and restricted areas covers the best-known ones.

The USDA. In July 2025 the USDA launched a National Farm Security Action Plan, moved the farmland register to an online filing system in January 2026, and in June 2026 proposed new rules with bigger, faster penalties for late filings and a definition of a "foreign adversary." A ban on purchases is not law. The House passed a farm bill in April 2026 that would direct one for buyers from adversary countries, and the Senate version stalled in committee.

That fits a broader pattern of Washington treating economic ties to China as a security question, from chip export controls to sanctions.

09What the Numbers Cannot Tell You

The register has real limits, and they cut both ways. It is self-reported: investors file a form, and the USDA has historically done little checking. The Government Accountability Office found errors and gaps in the data in a 2024 report, and between 2012 and 2021 the USDA assessed only eight penalties for late or missing filings. So some foreign holdings are surely missing, especially ones held through layers of shell companies. On the other side, the register counts a turbine lease on a family farm the same way it counts a ranch bought outright, which makes the total look bigger than the land foreigners actually control.

For comparison, foreign investors hold a far bigger share of something else Americans worry about: the national debt. You can see who holds it on Who Owns America's Debt?

10Get the Data

Everything here comes from the USDA's AFIDA data, which we clean and publish for free. Explore it county by county on the Foreign-Owned Farmland Map, or download it from Open Data: foreign-held land by state and by country (CSV, free to reuse with a credit link).

11Sources

• USDA FSA: Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land through December 31, 2024 (AFIDA annual report)
• USDA FSA: AFIDA annual reports, underlying data
• National Agricultural Law Center: Foreign ownership of agricultural land, FAQs and state laws
• National Agricultural Law Center: Foreign ownership update (July 2026)
• Iowa State CALT: Untangling the federal push to regulate foreign farmland ownership (Sept 2026)
• GAO: Foreign investments in U.S. agricultural land (GAO-24-106337, Jan 2024)
• NPR: China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here is where (June 2023)
• WTOP / AP: Smithfield Foods moves forward with IPO (Jan 2025)
• News 4 San Antonio: Texas passes bill to stop Chinese billionaire's wind farm (May 2021)
• Valley News Live: Air Force cites national security concerns over Fufeng project (Jan 31, 2023)
• Talk Business and Politics: Arkansas orders Syngenta to sell its farmland (Oct 2023)
• Norton Rose Fulbright: Texas law limits foreign ownership of real property (SB 17)
• Mayer Brown: CFIUS expands list of sensitive military facilities (Aug 2023)
• Thompson Hine: CFIUS final rule covering more military installations (Nov 2024)
• Trade Compliance Resource Hub: Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 (May 2026)

12More on DaveManuel.com

• Foreign-Owned U.S. Farmland Map
• Open Data: free datasets from DaveManuel.com
• Where your state meets the world
• Who owns America's debt?
• Sanctions Tracker
• Chip Export Controls Tracker
• How Iran replaced Russia as the top target of American sanctions
• What happens to tariffs now that Democrats control Congress