The Numbers Come First
U.S. farmland has become a $4.3 trillion asset class, according to Steve Bruere, president of agricultural real estate firm Peoples Company. The average value of U.S. farms hit roughly $4,350 per acre in the most recent year tracked by the USDA — a 4.3% year-over-year increase. Capital is voting loudly, and it is not voting for the family farmer.
The scale of elite land ownership is striking. According to the 2025 Land Report 100, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates holds 275,000 acres, ranking him 44th among American landowners. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos controls 462,000 acres. Stan Kroenke — Los Angeles Rams owner and husband to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke — tops both with 2.7 million acres.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Ko'olau Ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai has expanded to roughly 4,000 acres after he first purchased land there in 2014; the property carries a reported value of $300 million. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, meanwhile, offered a LinkedIn tour of his family farm in Jupiter, Fla., this week — banana shoots, an herb garden, and an apiary included. Neither man cracks the top 100 landowners nationally.
Why Billionaires Buy Dirt
Bruere frames the logic plainly: land is finite, positively correlated with inflation, and appreciates as costs rise. 'If you believe you want diversification, and you also believe we're going to have underlying inflation, then farmland is a great option,' he told Fortune. The post-2008 search for safe-haven alternatives drove the first wave; the COVID era, when buyers sought physical space and nonfinancial benefits — hiking, hunting, fishing, growing food — deepened it. AI hyperscalers hunting large land parcels for data infrastructure are now adding a third demand layer.
Nearly 40% of U.S. farmland is currently leased back to farmers and operators, per USDA data. Average rent for cropland is rising at just 0.6% annually — far slower than land prices — which Erin Foster West, policy campaigns director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, acknowledges is not inherently harmful to tenants in the short run.
The Cost to the Working Farmer
The structural problem is access and control. 'It makes it much harder for farmers to compete, especially beginning farmers who are maybe trying to acquire their first farm, or even an existing farmer who might want to grow and expand,' Foster West told Fortune. Renting also strips farmers of the autonomy needed to make long-term investments in soil quality or processing infrastructure.
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Free markets allocate capital efficiently, and farmland is no exception: when an asset hedges inflation and offers real utility, buyers appear. That is not a scandal — it is price discovery working exactly as designed. The USDA's own rent data shows tenants are not being gouged; the 0.6% annual rent increase is well below the land-price appreciation rate, meaning landowners are absorbing much of the carrying cost.
The genuine policy question is whether federal farm programs, zoning rules, and inheritance-tax structures are inadvertently accelerating consolidation by making it harder for working farmers to accumulate equity over time. If Washington wants more owner-operators on the land, the answer is fewer barriers to capital formation for small producers — not restrictions on who may buy an acre. Limiting property rights to engineer a preferred ownership class is a cure worse than the disease, and the taxpayer usually ends up funding the difference.
