Foreign persons report holding 46.3 million acres of US agricultural land — 3.6 percent of privately held farmland, nearly double the 2010 figure. Thirty state legislatures are writing laws about the number while almost nobody reads the register it comes from. A sourced walk through the AFIDA data: who holds American farmland, what held really means, and why the condition of the register is the sharpest finding in it.
Writing · investigation series · 5 parts
The Farmland Register
Who holds American agricultural land from abroad — the federal register nobody reads, the shell structures behind friendly flags, the thirty-state law wave, and the Hong Kong question. Five parts.
State laws ban farmland ownership tied to foreign adversaries, but enforcement leans on a federal register that records only the first ownership tier. Computed from the government files: most register-flagged secondary Chinese interests sit behind holdings attributed to Singapore, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong; one ChemChina-owned seed group appears under two country labels in a single file; and the acreage attributed to no country at all has grown six-fold since 2010.
Between 2023 and 2025, most US states enacted or strengthened laws restricting foreign ownership of land — but the statutes disagree on who counts as a foreign adversary, whether Hong Kong counts as China, whether leases count as ownership, and who checks. What the laws say, the single completed enforcement action, and the broken federal register they all lean on.
We took the largest conduit-flagged and no-country blocks in the US foreign farmland register and traced every ownership chain through public documents, with adversarial verification and a defamation review. Sovereign funds behind quiet flags, blank filings that resolve to Munich Re and the French state, a wall of fund structures whose investors no record names, and ghost entries carried for decades. The full map, chain by chain.
Since 2020, export controls, CFIUS, outbound-investment screening, and the ICTS rules have all treated Hong Kong as part of China. The federal farmland register still counts it separately — which is why the most famous Chinese-linked land purchase in America sits outside the China total the debate cites. One territory, five federal answers, and 144,000 acres in the gap.
The dataset behind the series: Foreign-Held U.S. Farmland — 46M foreign-held acres, CC0, keyless JSON. All series: the writing index.