Investors from other countries bought more than a million acres of farmland in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023. This foreign ownership of farmland is increasing in Ohio, where around 2,500 acres were snagged up by overseas investors in that same time period.
Foreign investors own around 538,000 acres of land in the state. Most of these investors come from European countries and neighboring Canada. Denmark holds just over a quarter of Ohio’s foreign-owned acres, followed by Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal.
“There's really no country that I would consider adversarial on this list for Ohio,” said American Farm Bureau economist Danny Munch. “There are a couple of acres linked to the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, but those are generally more linked to immigrant farms than to some sort of major corporation.”
Nationally, about 3.6% of all privately held agricultural land is owned by foreign investors. Ohio sits below the national average, at 2.7%.
Fueled by renewable energy projects
Much of the increase in foreign ag ownership can be traced to renewable energy projects, Munch said. Renewable energy projects account for nearly 55% of increased foreign land ownership since 2010.
Munch said that’s because many corporations in small European countries are seeing increased pressure, politically and socially, to offset their carbon emissions.
“We think about countries like Belgium, like the Netherlands, they're very small countries,” Munch explained. “They have a lot of ag production, but all the land is pretty much spoken for. So when they have to prove offsets, they have to really look somewhere else for land for renewable energy production.”
So, they look to land in the U.S. And while states like Texas and Oklahoma may have more acres and cheaper land, Ohio has become another prime spot for foreign investors to set up these projects.
Impact on Ohio landowners
Some farmers are concerned about foreign investors taking land out of production to be used for renewable energy projects. On top of that, many producers have national security concerns when foreign investors buy up valuable land, Munch said.
“There are concerns that other countries could be buying up land and then spying on us. That's been a concern being near sensitive military sites or sensitive energy generation infrastructure,” Munch said.
The concerns of organizations like the Ohio Farm Bureau have spurred on political action on the state and federal level. In 2023, Ohio passed a law that prohibits countries deemed as foreign adversaries by the U.S. Department of Commerce, like China, from owning land in the state. And, last year, former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown signed on to legislation to improve tracking of foreign farmland. It didn’t pass, but reforms have been reintroduced again this year.
Still, Munch said not all farmers agree that it’s an issue that requires government intervention. Some farmers are concerned about any federal regulation of who they can sell land to.
“Do you really want the federal government getting more involved in the sale of land?” Munch asked. “It might be on adversaries for now, but it could expand to other sorts of freedoms of selling their own property.”
Continuing trend
Regardless of where farmers stand on the issue, Munch said foreign ag ownership is likely to continue to increase in Ohio and across the country, as European countries continue to see pressure to offset emissions.
However, there has been a decline in foreign ownership from one country: China. Ownership by China-associated investors dropped 11% in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023. China owns about 277,000 acres of land in the nation, according to most recent data.
“That total equates to about the average size of a county in Ohio,” Munch said. “So in the big scheme of things, it's a small amount of land nationally.”
