The Trump Administration announced the National Farm Security Action Plan last week, that aims to secure and protect American farmland, enhance agricultural supply chain resilience, and protect the U.S. nutrition safety net from fraud and foreign exploitation.
The administration has been facing increased pressure to crack down on the amount of foreign-owned farmland in the U.S., especially surrounding U.S. military bases.
As part of that Plan, USDA released a Foreign Farm Land Purchases map and launched a suite of other actions. The map unveiled to the public Thursday, highlights the increase of foreign entities buying up land across all 50 states, which many lawmakers have deemed a national security risk.
The map indicates which countries own land in the U.S. and is tracked by which county the land is located in. It does not show specific parcels of land. USDA says it will work on continuous improvements to make the data more real time and more exact over the coming months.
Approximately 45.8 million acres, or 71,562 square miles, slightly larger than the state of Washington, of American soil belongs to foreign entities.
In Montana, for example, there are 930,299 acres owned by foreign entities, with Canada owning the lion’s share at 394,732 acres. Other countries with significant holdings in Montana include Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Venezuela.
Chinese companies and investors own more than 277,000 acres of agricultural land across 30 states. Other foreign adversaries have bought U.S. farm and forest land as well. Venezuela owns more than 90,000 acres of land across 17 states, Iran has bought more than 3,000 acres across 10 states, and Pakistan owns 2,100 acres across three states.
Additionally, over 3 million acres of U.S. land are owned by foreign entities of unknown origin.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins called the release of the Farm Security Action Plan, “the latest step to defend the homeland.”
“Gone are the days of foreign adversaries taking advantage of our farmland, farmers, and programs paid for by American taxpayers,” Rollins said. “Our work is far from done. We will continue to restore farm security and expose the extent to which our adversaries have targeted American agriculture.”
