From below:
Although Gates owns these farms, he isn’t changing their practices.
Instead, he mostly acts like a landlord and allows professional farmers
to keep doing their thing — even if those practices are ruinous to the
environment. Similar to private equity firms destabilizing the housing
market, millionaires and billionaires investing in farmland are also
creating their own set of issues, as they are now pricing out young
farmers looking to buy land.
https://news.yahoo.com/truth-why-bill-gates-keeps-134500929.html
Popular Mechanics
The Truth About Why Bill Gates Keeps Buying Up So Much Farmland
Darren Orf
Wed, January 18, 2023 at 5:45 AM PST
Bill Gates owns a ton of farmland in the United States—as in, about
270,000 acres.
That makes him the largest landowner in the U.S.
Stats show agriculture is a pretty good investment for billionaires.
Bill Gates and conspiracy theories go together like peanut butter and
jelly. The billionaire can’t seem to do anything without drawing the
conspiratorial ire of online netizens. One of the more colorful theories
pertains to Gates’s strange interest in U.S. agriculture, with rumors
that the former Microsoft CEO owns upward of 80 percent of farmland in
the United States.
Amazing, if true—but it’s extremely not. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything”
(AMA) last week, Gates once again fielded a question pertaining to his
AG holdings and stated that he actually only owns 1/4000 of all U.S.
farmland, or about 270,000 acres spread across 18 different states.
Although nowhere near 80 percent of U.S. farmland, it’s still a little
more than one-third of the state of Rhode Island, a surprising amount
for one person and enough to make Gates the largest landowner in the U.S.
So why does Bill Gates, and other billionaires like him, keep buying up
so much farmland?
Some experts have pointed to Gates’s well-known sustainability and green
tech initiatives as a possible reason, but during an earlier Reddit AMA
in 2021, Gates said, “my investment group chose to do this. It is not
connected to climate.” That’s because the old adage goes: “Buy land—they
aren’t making it anymore.” (Which volcanologists know isn’t exactly
true, but you get the idea).
Starting in 2013, Gates began investing his billions (through the firm
Cascade Investment) in agriculture because of its steady increase in
value and low volatility. According to Mother Jones, the average price
of farmland increased six times from 1940 to 2015, and the trend is
likely to continue as the amount of arable land in the U.S. continues to
shrink from climate-related pressures.
However, this practice of buying up agricultural land predates Bill
Gates and has been a popular investment for the super-rich since at
least the early 2000s. The financial crisis later in that same decade
prompted an explosion of investments into farmland when monetary safe
havens became scarce.
Although Gates owns these farms, he isn’t changing their practices.
Instead, he mostly acts like a landlord and allows professional farmers
to keep doing their thing—even if those practices are ruinous to the
environment. Similar to private equity firms destabilizing the housing
market, millionaires and billionaires investing in farmland are also
creating their own set of issues, as they are now pricing out young
farmers looking to buy land.
Will Bill Gates’s green tech initiatives ever intersect with his growing
agricultural empire? Who knows. In that same Reddit AMA from 2021, the
one where Gates separated his land investments from his sustainability
initiatives, he also mentioned the importance of “productive seeds” to
avoid deforestation as well as the production of biofuels, which relies
heavily on corn, in the very same answer.
For now, Gates’s ever-expanding farmland ownership is really just “rich
guy doing rich guy things,” and while concerning in a late-stage
capitalism sort of way, it isn’t as cartoonishly nefarious as some
conspiratorial corners of the internet want to believe.
