Between 2023 and 2025, restricting foreign ownership of land became one of the fastest-moving ideas in American state politics. Our tracker table, following the National Agricultural Law Center, lists 26 states with enacted restrictions and 3 more with reporting regimes — most of the new laws passed since 2023. Read the statutes side by side, though, and they are not one policy. They disagree about who is foreign, what counts as owning, and who is supposed to check.
What set it off
Two cases carried the wave: the Fufeng purchase near Grand Forks Air Force Base (2022) and the GH America ranch assemblage near Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, which prompted the first law of the modern wave — Texas's Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act (2021), whose author stated plainly it was written in response to that holding. After Grand Forks, the template went national: Florida's SB 264 in May 2023, Arkansas's Act 636 the same spring, and then a legislative cascade — by the 2025 session the National Agricultural Law Center counted roughly twenty-nine states restricting or limiting foreign acquisition of agricultural land.
Who counts as an adversary depends on the state line
Florida enumerates seven countries in statute — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. Texas's SB 17 (2025) names no country at all: it defers to whoever appears in the Director of National Intelligence's three most recent Annual Threat Assessments, currently China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — a list that can change without the legislature voting. Arkansas imports its enemies list from federal arms-control regulation (ITAR's section 126.1). Kentucky ties its ban to the same ITAR list; Idaho and Virginia use “foreign adversary” definitions; Missouri and Iowa restrict all foreign ownership generally, adversary or not, under statutes that predate the wave by decades. The same buyer can be prohibited in one state, merely reportable in the next, and unrestricted in a third.
Then there is the question none of them clearly answer: Hong Kong. Since Executive Order 13936 (2020), CFIUS has counted Hong Kong acquirers as China; export controls treat Hong Kong as China; Treasury's outbound-investment rules define the country of concern as the PRC including Hong Kong. Florida's statute names the PRC without mentioning Hong Kong; Texas's enrolled bill never uses the words. And the federal farmland register still counts Hong Kong separately — 144,090 acres, including the Fufeng parcels themselves, sitting outside the China total every one of these debates cites.
What counts as “owning” also varies
Kentucky's 2025 law reaches leasehold interests explicitly. Texas's SB 17 covers leases of a year or longer. Other statutes speak only of acquisition of title. That distinction is worth roughly a quarter of the federal register: about 10.6 million “foreign-held” acres are wind-energy leases, and foreign-state interests can arrive as leaseholds — as the Masdar/Terra-Gen case shows, where a UAE state company's stake put 106,000 acres of Texas wind leases under a foreign-government-linked flag without an acre changing owners.
The enforcement scoreboard: one
For all the legislation, the completed state enforcement record is a single action: Arkansas's October 2023 order against Syngenta's Northrup King Seed Co. — divest 160 acres in Craighead County, pay $280,000. It remains the sharpest illustration of what enforcement actually requires: the state had to establish that a Swiss-registered seed group was controlled by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, corporate research the statute assumes someone will do. Florida's law spent its first years in federal litigation; several other statutes are untested. And every one of them ultimately leans on ownership information the states do not collect — which mostly means the federal AFIDA register, a self-reported system that GAO found unreliable, that fined Fufeng $1,387.79 for filing late, and that missed the largest Chinese-linked holding in the country entirely.
The honest summary
The state-law wave is real, fast, and popular. It is also a patchwork of incompatible definitions enforced against a register that cannot reliably answer the question the laws ask. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the accountability point is neutral: a restriction is only as good as the ownership record behind it, and the record is the weak link. The full state-by-state table — category, statute notes, and sources — ships in the dataset, per the National Agricultural Law Center's tracker as of 2026-06-26.
Method
Statute characterizations follow the National Agricultural Law Center tracker and the statutes and enrolled bills cited: Fla. Stat. 692.201 (SB 264), Texas SB 17 (89th Legislature), Arkansas Act 636 and the Arkansas attorney general's enforcement release, Texas SB 2116 (87th), and Executive Order 13936 with CFIUS's annual-report classification note. Laws in this area change quickly and several face litigation — confirm against the state code before relying on any characterization. Aggregate and entity level only; no personal data.
The data: Foreign-Held U.S. Farmland — the 31-state law table, the register, and the attribution gap, keyless JSON, CC0.
Related writing: The Shell Game in the Farmland Register — the friendly-flag chains these laws would have to pierce.
Related writing: Who Owns American Farmland — the register itself: 46.3 million acres and what “held” means.
Related writing: The Hong Kong Question — the definitional gap these statutes inherit, in full.