'AMERICAN SOIL" Is Increasingly Foreign Owned. This doesn't seem like a good idea. Foreign Countries can buy the land right under our feet. When I read this article I was surprised Texas and Ohio are so involved in this. People from Texas always seemed so proud of their land and state. At least Iowa has restrictions. AMERICAN SOIL "Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up PATRIOTIC FEELINGS. They are also words that can't be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 MILLION ACRES of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities. When the stock market tanked during the past recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are NO FEDERAL RESTRICTIONS on the amount of land that can be foreign owned, it's been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations. It's likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation's farmland will change hands in the next few decades. "Texas is kind of a FREE-FOR-ALL, so they don't have a limit on how much land can be owned," say's Ohio Farm Bureau's Ty Higgins. "You look at Iowa and they restrict it — no land in Iowa is owned by a foreign entity." Ohio, like Texas, also has no restrictions, and nearly half a million acres of prime farmland are held by foreign-owned entities. In the northwestern corner of the state, below Toledo, companies from the Netherlands alone have purchased 64,000 acres for wind farms. There are two counties in this region with the highest concentration of foreign-owned farmland — more than 41,000 acres each. One of those is Paulding County, where three wind farms straddle the Ohio-Indiana line. Higgins says that this kind of consumption of farmland by foreign entities is starting to cause concern. "One of the main reasons that we're watching this ... is because once a foreign entity buys up however many acres they want, AMERICANS might NEVER be able to secure that land again. So, once we lose it, we may lose it for good." His other concern is that every acre of productive farmland that is converted over to something other than agriculture is an acre of land that no longer produces food. That loss is felt from the state level all the way down to rural communities, where one in six Ohioans has ties to agriculture. Angela Huffman is a sixth-generation farmer in Wyandot County, which, along with Paulding County, has more than 41,000 acres of foreign-owned farmland. Her modest, two-story white farmhouse has been in her family for almost 200 years. Her grandfather was the last person to actively farm the land here. When he got out of farming due to declining markets, none of his five children wanted to take over, and the cropland is now leased. But Huffman, a young millennial who lives here with her mother, wants to try to keep the farm going and revive her family heritage. Walking out to the barn, a huge white Great Pyrenees dog watches over a small flock of sheep. Huffman says she's worried about the effects of foreign land ownership on her rural community — which she describes as similar to Walmart pushing local businesses out of the market. "Right out my back door here, Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, has recently bought out a couple grain elevators," Huffman says, pointing across the field behind her house, "basically extracting the wealth out of the community." To be fair, U.S. farmers and corporations also invest in overseas agriculture, owning billions of dollars of farmland from Australia to Brazil, but the Smithfield Food buyout has really raised concerns with American farmers. As part of that 2013 sale, a Chinese company now owns 146,000 acres of prime U.S. farmland." https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned