Foreign-Held U.S. Farmland

Fifteen years of filings

Reported foreign-held acreage has grown every year since 2010 and accelerated sharply after 2017. USDA's own rulemaking puts the shift at 0.6 million acres a year from 2013 to 2017, then roughly 2.5 million acres a year since.

Sum of holdings reported in each year's USDA FSA detailed file (gross acres, including a small non-agricultural share). “Held as ownership” = fee interest, whole or partial; the remainder is mostly leaseholds of ten years or longer.

Who holds it (top 20 of 109 countries)

The register does not show what the debate assumes. The largest foreign holders of US agricultural land are allies — Canada alone reports a third of all foreign-held acres, much of it forest land — and the four statutory countries of concern together hold well under one percent.

Linked countries have a full dossier — state breakdown, land use, and 15-year trend — at /voidly/foreign-farmland/country/<name>/. A further 2.9M acres carry no usable country attribution in the register itself — filed as “no predominant country” (multi-national ownership structures) or “no foreign investor listed.” Country is the reported first-tier investor, not a verified ultimate parent.

The four countries of concern

USDA's annual report now carries a dedicated section on China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, and since 2023 the register flags holdings with a secondary interest in any of the four. The reported totals: 248K acres for China — 0.5% of foreign-held land, about 0.02% of all US agricultural land — and near-zero for the other three.

Chinese-associated holdings peaked in 2023 and fell in 2024. Since 2023 the register also flags secondary interests: 9 holdings currently carry a flagged secondary Chinese interest.

The holders USDA names

The annual report itself names the five companies behind 92% of Chinese-associated acreage. They are reproduced here exactly as the government publishes them — a record of official reporting, not an allegation.

The attribution gap: what a friendly flag can hide

The register records only the first ownership tier. GAO's review states it directly: the name listed “may not be the ultimate beneficiary,” and country attribution follows the reported investor, not the top of the chain. So a holding attributed to a friendly country can sit at the bottom of a chain that ends somewhere else — and the register itself now records measurable traces of exactly that.

The register's own flags land mostly on other countries' holdings

Since 2023, filers must flag any secondary interest held in a country of concern. Of the 9 holdings flagged for a secondary Chinese interest in the 2024 file, only 2 are attributed to China. The rest carry other flags:

The conduit flags

Acreage attributed to offshore financial centres and conduit jurisdictions — Singapore, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Bermuda, the UAE and similar — has more than tripled, from 933K acres in 2010 to 3.2M in 2024 (6.81% of the register). A conduit attribution is lawful and common — but it identifies a domicile, not an owner. Together with the unattributed buckets below, roughly 6.1 million acres — 13% of the register — carry no meaningful country answer.

The unattributed acres are growing faster than the register

Acres filed with no usable country at all — “no predominant country” (multi-national structures) plus “no foreign investor listed” — grew from 513K acres in 2010 (2.06% of the register) to 2.9M acres in 2024 (6.2%) — a nearly six-fold increase while the register as a whole roughly doubled. The acreage the register cannot attribute to any country is now about twelve times China's entire attributed total. Whatever sits in that bucket, nobody can say from the record — which is the point.

Late arrivals and moving labels

4,017 holdings totaling 4.9M acres in the 2024 file report acquisition dates of 2020 or earlier yet are absent from the 2020 file under the same identifiers — an upper bound mixing genuinely late filings with register re-keying, and the measurable ceiling of the late-filing pattern GAO documented. Labels move too: Country labels move between years without land changing hands: holdings of Formosa Plastics Corp. Texas and Formosa Plastics Development Corp. (27,573 acres) were attributed to China through 2022 and recoded to Taiwan in 2023 — the register’s most politically watched total carried a Taiwanese conglomerate for years.

Documented chains

Each chain below is also drawn node by node on the Shell Map — from the land to a sovereign fund, a documented parent, or the exact point where the public record goes dark.

The register also classifies Hong Kong separately from China: 144,090 acres — including the Fufeng Grand Forks parcels — are attributed to Hong Kong and not counted in China's 247,659. CFIUS, by contrast, has reported Hong Kong acquirers as originating from China since Executive Order 13936 (2020) — two federal classification regimes, opposite answers. All figures in this section are computed from the federal files or cited to government records and documented investigations; a chain through a friendly jurisdiction is a documented structure, not an accusation against any listed country or company.

Where it is (top 15 states)

All 50 states plus territories appear in the full dataset. Maine's total is dominated by Canadian timberland; Texas leads on acreage across many investor countries.

What kind of land — and what kind of “held”

“Foreign-held” is broader than “foreign-owned.” The AFIDA form does not distinguish outright purchase from a lease of ten years or longer, so wind-farm leases on American-owned ranches file the same way as a purchased timber tract. In 2024, 64% of reported acres were held as fee ownership; USDA attributes 10.6 million acres — roughly a quarter of the total — to wind-energy leases, of which less than 1% is owned outright.

Individuals account for 1.9% of reported acreage. They appear in this dataset only inside aggregate totals, never as records.

The register's own defects (10 documented)

Every number above is a reported minimum from a register the government itself documents as flawed. These are not this site's judgments; each defect below is stated by GAO, USDA, or a published FOIA review, and linked to its source. Read the totals accordingly.

• GAO found the largest China-associated holding (over 27,000 acres) double-counted in both the detailed spreadsheet and the annual report; USDA confirmed the error.

  source

• GAO found 918 of roughly 43,000 holdings carried no country of association at all.

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• AFIDA records only the first ownership tier. The named investor may not be the ultimate beneficial owner, and country attribution is a reported minimum, not a verified fact.

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• GAO reported that Fufeng USA filed its AFIDA disclosure for the Grand Forks, North Dakota purchase after the statutory deadline.

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• FSA states the detailed data may contain inaccuracies, including typographical errors from manual entry of paper filings, and that historical spreadsheets are not retroactively corrected.

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• Filings are self-reported. USDA describes reported holdings as minimums; late filings and reconciliations shift year-over-year totals.

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• The FSA-153 form does not distinguish outright ownership from leases of 10 years or longer. 10.6 million acres of the 2024 total (about 23 percent) are wind-energy lease holdings; less than 1 percent of that wind-associated land is owned outright.

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• Computed from the FSA detailed files: in the 2024 data, about 1.55 million acres are filed under "no predominant country" and 1.38 million acres under "no foreign investor listed". In the 2013 file, the type-of-interest column is defective for nearly every row, so the ownership-vs-lease split is unpublishable for that year.

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• Enforcement has been minimal: an Investigate Midwest FOIA review found only 10 AFIDA penalties totaling $115,724 assessed from 2011 onward, with zero fines in 2015-2017.

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• Publication lag is roughly 13 months: data through December 31, 2024 was published in January 2026.

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The state-law wave (31 states tracked)

While the federal register stayed a paper filing, the states moved. Per the National Agricultural Law Center's tracker (as of 2026-06-26), approximately twenty-nine states specifically forbid or limit nonresident aliens, foreign business entities, or foreign governments from acquiring or owning an interest in private agricultural land — most of the new laws enacted since 2023 and aimed at “foreign adversary” ownership.

Categorization follows the National Agricultural Law Center tracker as of 2026-06-26. Statute details change quickly; confirm against the state code before relying on any entry.

Machine access

The entire dataset is a single keyless static JSON file — /foreign-farmland/index.json — no key, no rate limit, no server. It is self-describing: meta carries counts, sources, and a field dictionary (meta.schema); the arrays cover the 15-year trend, 109 investor countries, every state, the four countries of concern, land use, interest and filer types, the register's documented defects, and state laws. Each major investor country also has a stable dossier page at /voidly/foreign-farmland/country/<name>/, the structured ownership chains live under shellMap (drawn at /voidly/foreign-farmland/shell-map/), and all Voidly datasets are listed in one manifest.

import urllib.request, json

data = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(
    'https://ai-analytics.org/foreign-farmland/index.json'))

print(data['meta']['agAcres'])            # 46,277,051 acres through 2024-12-31
for c in data['countries'][:5]:           # largest investor countries
    print(c['country'], c['acres'], c['share'])
china = next(a for a in data['adversaries'] if a['country'] == 'China')
print(china['acres'], china['trend'])     # 15-year series, no key required

Source data: US government work (public domain). This compilation: CC0 1.0 — no authentication, no attribution required.

Public data sources (4)

• USDA FSA AFIDA underlying detailed data (2010-2024 annual .xlsx)
• USDA AFIDA annual report: Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land through December 31, 2024
• GAO-24-106337: Foreign Investments in U.S. Agricultural Land (Jan 2024)
• National Agricultural Law Center — state foreign-ownership law tracker