The American public has probably never heard of Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao, so it may come as a surprise that he is one of the biggest foreign property owners in the US, according to the Land Report’s latest ranking. As per Bloomberg Business Week, he owns 198,000 acres (80,127 hectares) of Oregon timberland.
About 40 million acres of American agricultural land was owned by non-US interests as of 2021, according to the most recent Department of Agriculture data, with entities from China owning the equivalent of .03% of all US farmland.
Chen, 50, acquired the acreage from Fidelity National Financial Ventures for $85 million in 2015. Oregon tax records last month revealed the name of the beneficial owner as Shanda Asset Management, the same name as Chen’s Singapore-based holding group.
His Oregon property makes him one of the biggest individual owners of American land by a non-US citizen. Only the Irving family of Canada — No. 6 on the Land Report’s list with over 1.2 million acres of Maine timberland — owns more. Indeed, Canada remains the largest foreign investor, accounting for 32% of the acres, much of which are forest in Maine.
But despite the alarmist headlines, China’s holdings, a primary concern of lawmakers who want to restrict foreign ownership of farms, account for less than 1% of foreign-owned acres at 350,000, a slight decrease from 2021.
The Chinese are not alone in their bid to gobble up American land and they are not even in the top. Aside from the Canadian holdings, the vast majority of the transactions were European wind power companies leasing land from U.S. farmers to build wind turbines. One Italian wind company in particular disclosed 40 new leases of farmland in just one rural Illinois county. The same company had leases in at least four other states.
Foreign ownership of US land — particularly land used for farming — has become a sensitive political issue in recent years. Lawmakers are concerned about the vast holdings by foreign companies and would like to curb the sales and purchases of American agricultural property. The Senate voted in July to ban the sale of farmland beyond a certain acreage or value to people or businesses from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but the measure wasn’t ultimately signed into law. Almost half of all states have some sort of restrictions on foreign ownership, but at present this does not seem to be preventing the practice.
Why is it such a widespread trend for foreign entities? One reason is that ultra-wealthy investors are seeking an inflation hedge and uncorrelated assets, and farmland and other rural properties seems to fit the bill. The average value of US cropland jumped 8.1% last year and has risen by more than a third since 2020, according to the USDA. Other reasons are food production, wind farming, carbon offsets, or speculative investments. Most importantly, the business environment in the US is attractive with its access to capital and natural resources, an educated workforce, a stable democracy, transparent and predictable legal system, and product innovation.
Across the country, the 2013 purchase of Smithfield Foods by the Chinese firm Shuanghui, now called WH Group, received national attention and escalated concerns about Chinese intervention in U.S. food systems. The deal meant that WH Group now owns the largest pork producer in the United States.
Andy Gipson, Mississippi’s commissioner of agriculture and commerce, is alarmed by the growing trend of foreign ownership, even when by allies such as the Netherlands and Germany, who are investing heavily in large swaths of Mississippi’s farmland.
For Gipson the major threat is “Our ability as a country, as a state to produce our own food, our own fiber and our own shelter,” he told Stateline. “And I think every acre that’s sold to anybody outside of this country is one less acre that we have to rely on for our own self-interest, our own national food security.”
The menace is real and imminent and the government needs to act. “I think the time is going to be right in 2024 for the legislature to tighten these laws up,” Gipson says.
