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How Much Farmland Is Owned By Foreign Interests? It’s Hard To Know.

By Bridgit Bowden
 
Foreign ownership of farmland has shot up in Wisconsin and across the country. But according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, enforcement of the laws that regulate foreign ownership of farmland is lax. And because of that, we probably don’t know how much land is owned by foreign interests.
 
Foreign companies that own agricultural land in the United States are required by the 1978 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act to report it. But it’s self-reported and rarely enforced. So the database of foreign land owners contains errors and omissions.
 
For example, the records show 8,733 acres in Manitowoc County valued at more than $19 million. The land was acquired by a Canadian company or person in 2014. But the space where the owner should be listed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture database published by the Midwest Center has been left blank. It doesn’t say where the land is. So, WPR's Bridgit Bowden went to Manitowoc County to see if she could find it.
 
She drove all afternoon one day in early December looking for this land. There are almost 1 million acres in Manitowoc County and Bowden didn't see any Canadian flags or other signs that she might have been looking at the foreign-owned land. She thought someone in the county government might know where the land is, so she called the Manitowoc County Register of Deeds.
 
Without the owner’s name or the location of the land, there wasn’t much the office could do.
 
"If I just had a little bit ... even an idea of where in the county it was, but because you don't have that idea, I mean, it's like a needle in the haystack for me looking," said a woman from the office before transferring the phone call to the county Planning and Zoning Office, which couldn't help zero in on a location either.
 
A few things could be happening. Maybe the land was sold, and that wasn’t reported to the USDA. Maybe there was a typo in the report. Maybe the land is broken up into multiple parcels. It’s hard to know.
 
That's a problem for Joe Maxwell, executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a nonprofit focusing on antitrust and trade policy in agriculture.
 
"We don't want to scare people, but the fact is that our countryside is being bought up by foreign people, and we don't even know who they are," Maxwell said.
 
The problem with the record keeping, he said, is that the law requiring land to be reported is hardly ever enforced.
 
Between 2004 and 2010, the USDA issued 187 fines. Since 2011, there were 10 fines, with none since 2014.  
 
A USDA spokesman said the number of fines has decreased every year since 2004 because many of the filings the agency receives now are from large wind and solar companies who lease land for long periods as opposed to owning it. He said they file in a timely period and are not subject to the penalty provisions of the law.
 
Maxwell believes that some foreign owners of U.S. land just don’t report it.
 
"So, while we have a database, it does not properly reflect the overall investment by foreign interest in America's agriculture." he said.
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