
'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned - drocer88
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned
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lettergram
There's approximately 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., so 30 million
acres is around 3%[1].

Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident
in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned
farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one.

[1] [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-
statistic...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-
charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/)

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nostrademons
"Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident
in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned
farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one."

I've wondered about this for a while. On one hand, owning investments on
foreign soil seems super risky when shit hits the fan, because you depend upon
friendly relations with the legal system of the foreign country to enforce
your property rights. If it really comes down to "Americans are going hungry
and homeless because Chinese are speculating on real estate", don't you think
they're going to kick the Chinese out regardless of what the deed says?

OTOH, the scale of interconnectedness across the globe seems to create a very
large market for private non-national security companies. It's not just
Chinese in America - as the article noted, it's Americans in a wide variety of
other countries, as well as corporations owning factories and having whole
supply chains across the globe. If shit hits the fan there will be _a lot_ of
money seeking mercenaries, private armies, and independent defense contractors
to enforce their property rights globally.

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TomMckenny
But there are already a great many homeless and not the slightest move has
been made in this direction. Perhaps there just aren't enough yet.

If the nation is run by its people then what you describe would indeed happen.
If it is run by a small cadre of wealthy then they would invite investment
world wide to maximally drive up land values regardless of homeless numbers.
Indeed there would be extreme reluctance as any seizure or even hint of it
would permanently reduce land values.

Perhaps we'll see which is the case.

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badpun
Regarding homeless - there's a great youtube channel where a guy does long
interviews with homeless people (unfortunately available in Polish only), and
they basically say that, for them, consistently getting up early, commuting to
job, working hard for 8+ hours (while being sober) is just more of a hassle
than living on a street. There will always be people like that and the only
way to not have homeless at all is to give people everything they need for
free (UBI).

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TomMckenny
I not sure I'd put too much faith in a YouTube series. Also, sometimes
Wikipedia is almost as good[1]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

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mdorazio
Some weird cognitive dissonance here. On one hand farmers are concerned that
companies buying up land to use for windfarms means the land is no longer used
for food. But we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays
farmers not to sell it... and taking farmland out of production would
theoretically increase crop prices for everyone else.

As the article points out, farmers are retiring and their families don't want
to run the farms anymore, so someone needs to buy it. Your choices are
generally going to be either a mega farming corp or investors.

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epistasis
Scratch the surface of the farmer complaints, and they're probably just upset
that they can't gobble up their neighbors' acreage as smaller farms fail. Wind
gives a steady source of income that can keep farmers afloat if a crop doesn't
go well. Meanwhile the large successful farmers are looking for land so that
they can expand, or perhaps for some so that their multiple children can
continue the tradition.

I've read a couple articles on wind/solar use of farm land where the farmers'
quotes reveals their true interests and concerns. At first they may complain
about "change" or views, but their view, but economic expansions comes out as
the far more likely culprit. Farmers are far far more politically
sophisticated than the crazy billboards on I-5 would have a person believe.

Wind also has almost negligible impact inland use, and even if the land is
foreign owned it will likely be rented out to be farmed. Farmland that is
leased for solar use is almost always the marginal parts of the land that
don't produce much anyway.

And some German experiments are combing solar with crops in a way that
produces overall economic wins. Many farmers will adapt quickly to new tech,
and those that don't will go bankrupt quickly.

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Bombthecat
I'm pretty sure it's because those families calculated and planned for years
ahead.

They are mostly economically more invested and interested than average Joe
from the street...

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klipt
How much land do American citizens own outside the US? Probably a lot more
than non-Americans own in the US?

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yonran
Yet another reason for a heavy land value tax: to ensure that the fruits of
the land benefit the community even when it has been purchased by a foreign
corporation.

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duxup
Didn't we go through a period worrying about this (non farm land that time)
with the Japanese?

Didn't work out for them...

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rchaud
No discussion of US farming subsidies that incentivize these kinds of land
investments?

The land in and of itself isn't worth much more than its lot value, and the
Canadians, Chinese and Germans aren't exactly buying all those acres to turn
them into parking lots and strip malls.

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Causality1
>And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can
be foreign-owned

That's very surprising for a nation that bars foreign-flagged ships from
moving cargo between American ports.

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jdhn
The Jones Act should have been repealed a long time ago.

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newhotelowner
I want to buy a few acres of farmland, but either it's too expensive or its in
remote location.

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k_sh
> too expensive or its in remote location

This is generally how land values work...

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mistermann
Generally....how much has "too" varied over time though? Was it as relatively
expensive for an middle to upper middle class person to pick up a few acres 30
years ago as it is now? I've heard more than one farmer say you have to
operate at very large scales to justify current farm prices, but I have no
idea how true that is (and of course, it varies by region).

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k_sh
> how much has "too" varied over time though?

Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x
what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill
down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs
the Southeast).

[0]: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-
land-v...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-
tenure/farmland-value/)

