Commentary: Data Centers Aren’t the Only Threat to Farmland

A commentary piece from the National Family Farm Coalition describes farmers in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin turning down offers ranging from $15 million to more than $70 million for their land, much of it sought for data center development. The authors frame this as one visible skirmish in a much larger and quieter trend: institutional investors, pension funds, and private equity treating farmland as a stable asset class to park wealth against inflation.

Citing the 2024 TOTAL survey, the piece reports that 87% of the more than 2 million landowners renting out farmland are non-operators who collected over $34 billion in rent, atop $1.7 trillion in rentable farmland value, up 47% since 2014. Institutional investor holdings in farmland have more than doubled in three years to $16.6 billion, an eightfold rise since 2008, with the largest corporate owners controlling over 2 million acres by public data alone.

The authors tie this to a harder underlying story: 159,000 family farms lost between 2017 and 2022, and farm debt at record highs, which they argue leaves selling to the highest bidder as often the only viable exit. They point to the Farmland for Farmers Act, modeled on Midwestern anti-corporate farming laws, as the policy remedy on offer in Congress.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.