Bill Gates and your plate
"There is simply not enough land."
Earlier this month, when The Land Report revealed that Bill Gates is now the top owner of farmland in the US, word of that “surprising” fact traveled fast.
But for many farmers and those who work on land access and sustainable agriculture issues, a famous billionaire buying up 242,000 acres was just another plot point in a long, familiar narrative: It’s the story of an ever smaller set of rich people and corporations controlling land—over farmers and local communities.
“Bill Gates’ purchases illustrate the unmitigated crisis of inequity in access to land,” says Holly Rippon-Butler, the land campaign director for the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC). Rippon-Butler’s job exists because year after year, young, idealistic farmers report that purchasing land is one of their biggest challenges.
In a new report, NYFC digs deep into why, starting with tracing the concept of land as a commodity that can be bought and sold back to a settler-colonial construct. “This framework has been enforced through the United States’ political and legal systems, and it has been used to dispossess Indigenous people of billions of acres of land. Land is also tied with wealth extraction from every community of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in America since Columbus. The result is deep inequity—98 percent of farmland in the US is owned by white people and 95 percent of farmers are white,” she says.
And while there has been little reporting so far on what Gates plans to do with his acres over the long-term, the way that his foundation approaches agricultural aid in Africa can provide insights into his overall perspective on what “sustainable farming” looks like. “Bill Gates, and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are all about unleashing markets and promoting technology in agriculture,” explains Tim Wise, an expert on global development, food, and the environment.
Why does any of this matter?
Farm real estate is worth trillions of dollars, and land is often a farmer’s biggest asset. Farmers cannot produce healthy food or provide environmental stewardship of natural resources without land to do it on or without being able to support themselves on that land.
Here’s what you need to know about who owns farmland in the US—with expert perspectives on how that affects people, the planet, and what ends up on your plate day after day.
Land is Power
Farmland is a limited resource. Farmers that do own their land often pass it on to their children or sell to developers. American Farmland Trust estimates that about 2,000 acres of farmland per day are lost to development. “We have to ask ourselves how much longer this trend can continue. There is simply not enough land,” Rippon-Butler said. And institutional investors have been snapping up farmland at increasing rates over the past decade, driving up prices. According to USDA data, foreign investment in American farmland is also increasing. Between 2008 and 2018, acres of cropland in foreign hands went from 2.8 million to 6.6 million acres. International investors owned a grand total of 32 million acres of farmland in 2018.
For farmers starting out, this all coalesces into a massive barrier: very little land available and high prices for acres that are for sale. Instead of buying, they often lease. In 2017, about 40 percent of US farmland was rented. But that can perpetuate an imbalance of power, Rippon-Butler points out.
“When farmers own land, they can leverage that land to capitalize further land purchases, infrastructure investments, or other forms of saving that benefit future generations,” she explains. “The effects are clear: in our 2017 survey of young farmers across the country, the average farm size of respondents who came from farm families was 87.25 compared to 12 acres for those from non-farming backgrounds.”
Inequities abound
The impacts of land stolen from Indigenous people, slavery and continued discrimination against Black people, and generational wealth building among white farm families then add up to the aforementioned situation: 98 percent of US acres in the hands of white people.
“Land-related challenges are compounded for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, farmworkers, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals,” Rippon-Butler says. “In particular, the intersection of land access challenges with structural racism makes these factors more acute for many BIPOC farmers.”
And what does the Gates approach to “sustainable agriculture” look like?
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works on pressing global health issues around the world, and they do a lot of good. President Obama gave the couple the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Bill Gates has also been a leading voice on how pressing the climate crisis is and has a new book on that topic dropping in February.
But so far, his approach to climate-friendly agriculture seems to be focused on building efficiencies into industrial systems. Think: growing more corn with less fertilizer on the same amount of land, rather than uprooting a system that rewards monocultures and replacing it with more diversified, regenerative production. In Africa, this has involved encouraging the planting of hybrid seed varieties made by the biggest agribusiness companies and subsidizing the cost of chemical fertilizers.
Many people agree with that approach, but Tim Wise is not one of them. Wise got an upfront look at Gates’ impact on agriculture in Africa while working on his book, Eating Tomorrow. More recently, he worked on a report on AGRA, an organization funded primarily by the Gates foundation. “Their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) seeks to implant Western-style industrialized agriculture on African farmland. It has been a failure on its own terms, as our False Promises report showed, generating mediocre productivity gains and negligible increases in farmer incomes, while the number of undernourished people in its 13 target countries has increased 30 percent,” he says. “They prioritize small-scale farmers but promote technologies those farmers don't want or need and can't afford. The result is higher production of some starchy staple crops at the expense of a more diverse array of nutritious crops.”
In the US, Wise says he’s worried Gates’ tech-first bias will accelerate a trend toward “an agriculture without farmers, with drones and GPS-guided machines farming vast tracts of monocultures of commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Rural communities have already been hollowed out by US agricultural policies and practices. We should be reversing, not accelerating, that process. That involves democratizing land ownership rather than allowing rich investors to buy up farms from families that can no longer make a living from farming.”
This land was made for...
To be clear, I didn’t talk to Bill Gates for this, and at this point, there is almost no information available on what he plans to do with his pockets full of farmland.
But in the end, it’s not really about him. What is interesting to me is the idea that his ownership of farmland points to bigger questions about our food system that are going to need to be worked out. Questions about whether farmland should just go to guys in suits with no real stake in the soil. Or whether ownership should be managed differently to address inequities, for example, or reward sustainable methods of production.
NYFC is a policy organization, and its leadership believes public policy is the best tool for tackling the challenges their member farmers face. “As millions of acres are predicted to change hands in the coming years, there is an opportunity to work towards land justice, rematriation, and more equitable models of land access that put land in the hands of young, diverse farmers,” Rippon-Butler says.
She pointed to actions already happening at the state level, like in Minnesota, where an anti-corporate farmland ownership law has been in place since 1973. “These laws are designed around the principle that corporations don’t live on the land, they don’t live in the community, they don’t employ local people or make decisions based on what’s best for their neighborhood,” she says.
Wise proposed one simpler—albeit unlikely—solution. “As a philanthropist publicly committed to giving away his fortune, the best thing Bill Gates could do with that land is donate it to a land trust dedicated to repopulating the countryside with young farmers committed to the kind of diversified, regenerative agriculture that can restore lands and rebuild rural communities.”
A side of policy
(Executive) order up! President Biden has been cranking out executive orders since he got into office, and many of them will have major impacts on the food system.
First, he made changes to nutrition programs that will boost payments to families struggling to put food on the table. The tweaks include increasing a benefit paid to students who qualify for free school meals and increasing SNAP benefits for the lowest-income families.
He also directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the agency tasked with protecting American workers on the job—to consider whether an “emergency temporary standard” for COVID-19 is necessary and to review and focus enforcement. Under Trump, OSHA largely took a “hands off” approach. Thousands of workers in meatpacking plants and on farms have contracted COVID-19 and hundreds have died. Leah Douglas at FERN has been doing an incredible job tracking those stats.
Slow down, you move too fast. On a related note, Biden’s USDA withdrew a proposal that would have permanently allowed for faster line speeds at chicken processing plants. The poultry industry was pressing for the change, but worker and food safety advocates said it was dangerous on both fronts.
Still hungry?
“They just stopped feeding the children.” For Civil Eats, I covered work that lawyers and researchers were doing throughout 2020 to make sure Black students had equal access to school meals during the pandemic.
Currently devouring
Can they due it? The Counter has the story on how Amazon workers, including those employed by Whole Foods, will vote on unionizing this February. If successful, the effort would impact Bezos’ many, many workers but also have huge implications for the grocery and retail industry.
Reef restoration. Lela Nargi’s FoodPrint piece on rebuilding oyster reefs around the country is a great read. I especially love the connections it makes between ecosystem benefits and healthy fisheries. And speaking of fish…
Actually eating
I got a delivery of fish from Tre Fin Day Boat Seafood and was excited to try it. The company is made up of a group of Oregon fishers who catch everything hook-and-line to minimize by-catch. They’re now operating a “community supported fishery,” which I’m interested in writing about as a model for buying better fish. Possibly more on that soon! For now, this is a delicious piece of halibut with potatoes, fennel, olives, and herbs.
Let’s be friends
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