Trading Acres

abstract. Farms are places where people live their lives, sustain their families, and produce food and fiber for the wider community. Today, however, farms are becoming assets swept up into global financial channels—converting from repositories of agrarian ideals into paper playthings for the very rich. This transformation of farmland reflects broader patterns of financialization occurring across multiple elements of daily life and compounds wider crises of concentration and industrialization in agriculture. But as an active land grab unfolds across rural America, farmland’s recent capture by absentee investors is especially concerning, threatening rural livelihoods, agricultural and food-system resilience, economic and spatial justice, and—in our estimation—democracy itself.

In this Article, we argue that Wall Street’s arrival at rural America’s gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. We explore the ways in which these definitional features of the American legal system—from the primacy of market logics to a range of biases that skew spatial, temporal, and social relations—create the conditions for the profound transformation now underway: the process by which farmland—a basic and essential rural resource—is being integrated into the modern capital economy.

Today’s rural land grab is meeting little resistance. But historically, investor-owned farmland was seen as a deep and politically motivating threat to rural life. We analyze past attempts to rein in the financialization of farmland and argue that many failed because modest doctrinal reforms provide no match for the deeper legal structures privileging profit-driven investment, even in land. Sophisticated financial actors easily maneuver to exploit definitional loopholes and other opportunities for evasion, resulting in what we frame as a pattern of “playing shell games with finance.” After exploring past reforms, we turn to modern obstacles to change and conclude that, despite these ongoing challenges, opportunities still exist to address the harms that follow from financialized farmland ownership.

Such reforms, however, require legal and policy frameworks that create more robust systems of democratic land governance, rural community resilience, and sustainable food production. We end with possible interventions aimed at building this more equitable and sustainable future, emphasizing movement work that democratizes rural land relations and values the deeply rooted knowledge and experience of the people who live in and care about the countryside.

authors. Jessica A. Shoemaker is Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law. James Fallows Tierney is Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Chicago-Kent College of Law. An Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York provided essential financial support for Jessica Shoemaker’s contribution to this work. We thank Alexandra Bogner, Connor Oldenburg, Rodriggo Pires, and Elizabeth Railey for excellent research assistance. For helpful discussion, we thank Eric Berger, William A. Birdthistle, Terry J. Centner, Brett Christophers, Adrienne Davis, Sarah Fackrell, Luke Herrine, Sarah Hofmeyer, Andrew K. Jennings, Brandon J. Johnson, Anita K. Krug, Kyle Langvardt, Jonathan Levy, Gregory P. Magarian, Sarah Mills, Richard E. Moberly, K-Sue Park, Alexander I. Platt, Margot J. Pollans, Mark D. Rosen, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs, Anthony Schutz, Cary Martin Shelby, Joseph William Singer, Adam Thimmesch, Levi Van Sant, and Steven L. Willborn. We also thank organizers and participants at the Who Owns Rural America? workshop hosted by the Rural Reconciliation Project; the Future of Capitalism: Neo-Feudalism? conference at the University of Chicago; the Law and Rurality Workshop hosted at the University of Iowa College of Law; the Progressive Property Workshop hosted at Fordham University; and the annual meetings of both the Association for Law, Property, and Society and the Rural Sociological Society. Finally, we thank faculty participants in colloquia held at the Washington University School of Law, the University of Nebraska College of Law, and the Chicago-Kent College of Law, as well as students in Professor Shelby’s class at Chicago-Kent.

Introduction

In a recent campaign advertisement, Congressman Mike Flood, a Nebraska member of the U.S. House of Representatives, stands in a just-harvested cornfield, a green tractor and blue sky behind him, and draws a firearm from the holster clipped to his jeans. Above him floats a red spy balloon, emblazoned with the Chinese flag. Turning to shoot the balloon, Flood declares: “I’m fighting to . . . stop China from buying Nebraska farmland.”2

Approximately twenty states already limit foreign land ownership in some form, and a “flurry of bills” in state legislatures now seek to expand these bans by “[preventing] foreign ownership of agricultural land.”3 Reflecting a rare bipartisan consensus, both Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Mike Pence have called to restrict foreign involvement in United States agriculture.4 And more recently, the second Trump Administration announced its National Farm Security Action Plan, with protection of American farmland listed as a top priority (but purchases by foreign countries or adversaries identified as the only threat).5

Although dramatic shifts in farmland ownership are indeed occurring across rural America, foreign investment is only a very tiny fraction of what is, instead, a much broader domestic land grab arriving at rural America’s proverbial gate. Today’s primary farmland buyers are private-equity funds, public and private real-estate investment trusts (REITs), pension funds, university endowments, and high-net-worth individuals.6 The presence of foreign actors—who often lease, not own, land7—pales in comparison to this much broader financialized takeover of farmland ownership.8 Investor interest in U.S. farmland has spawned an array of “shiny new investment vehicles” designed to “accommodate and encourage investors’ newfound passion for soil,” along with a new financial ecosystem of agricultural asset managers and financial sponsors who have “popped up like mushrooms on a giant log.”9

This increasingly financialized landscape is a dramatic departure from the traditionally bucolic vision of rural America anchored by smallholder farmers.10 American farms have long been envisioned as both family-owned and locally rooted, evoking powerful American ideals of rural landowners who work hard, steward well, and care for neighbors.11 Central to this vision is the widespread distribution of owner-occupied farmland,12 which reflects America’s legacies of civic republicanism and democratic, agrarian land ownership.13 But today, reality is increasingly divorced from these long-held ideals.

In 1977, when a Midwest bank floated plans to create one of the first farmland investment vehicles—an entity called Ag-Land Trust—Congress erupted into widespread bipartisan outrage.14 Promoters planned to raise $50 million in equity financing from pension funds in order to “buy about 20 farms of about 640 acres each,” with the intent to “lease them to local farmers” and provide “annual income for pension funds who invest in [Ag-Land].”15 In response, Congress held three days of hearings, and out of nearly fifty people giving statements, only Ag-Land Trust’s own representatives were in favor.16 One of South Dakota’s senators at the time called the proposal “a highhanded attack on the basic premise of the family farm system,”17 while a representative from Missouri stated that “this land power grab by the big financeers [sic]” would “be the deathknell for the small family farm.”18 National headlines amplified public concerns.19 A month later, the bank withdrew its proposal.20

The widespread outcry over the Ag-Land Trust proposal of the 1970s contrasts sharply with the increasingly financialized reality of modern American agriculture. Today, financialized ownership of U.S. farmland is much more commonplace21: “[A]t least 300 private equity funds are specifically oriented towards food and agriculture.”22 Other institutional investors play major roles as well. Consider the retirement-services provider Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), well known for managing “accounts for educators, researchers, and public service workers.”23 Describing its asset-manager subsidiaries Nuveen and Westchester Group, TIAA bills itself as the “top manager of farmland assets in the world, with more than 2 million farm acres under its control.”24 According to reports, these investments include “vast landholdings in the Mississippi Delta, where Black farmers have been largely displaced from their farms as a result of land theft.”25 In 2024, a university data-journalism class and a nonprofit newsroom spent months investigating, “Who is buying Nebraska?”26 The answer was clear: “multinational corporations, out-of-state corporate farms and out-of-state investors.”27 North Carolina’s Great Plains Farm LLC, for example, spent roughly $65 million for about 12,500 acres of Nebraska land, while San Francisco’s Homestead Capital laid out almost $33 million for just over 5,800 acres.28 Meanwhile, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has become the largest private owner of farmland in the country, with holdings acquired through his investment manager that are, Gates says, “not connected to climate.”29

In one respect, absentee investment in farmland is part of a broader national trend towards financialization, or “the tendency for profit making in the economy to occur increasingly through financial channels rather than through productive activities.”30 A concept we elaborate on below, farmland’s financialization is not merely a market trend but is instead the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. These foundational legal structures create the requisite preconditions for investors to translate material space (farmland) into capital (asset), flowing through far-flung economic channels.31

The risks associated with large-scale farmland investment in the United States are also widely misunderstood. Attention-grabbing headlines focused only on foreign ownership, for example, miss this much wider domestic land-grab dynamic entirely.32 Legal scholars have also largely missed this transition,33 though scholars in geography, sociology, political science, and rural studies have been sharply critical of these trends—both here and abroad.34 We bring these scholars into conversation with legal scholarship here and contribute our own unique combination of expertise as scholars of property and securities law.

This Article offers the first sustained account of farmland’s financialization through the combined lenses of corporate law, property law, and securities regulation. These bodies of doctrine are rarely put into dialogue, even as their intersection quietly enables the translation of soil into shares. The novelty of our contribution, therefore, lies not only in diagnosing the legal underpinnings of this formation of a new asset class but also in showing how farmland is a particularly important and powerful site to evaluate law’s constitutive role in financialization.

Our analysis begins with the plain commitments that rural communities matter, that farms should produce food sustainably, that real people should have the opportunity to become farmers, and that concentrated absentee control over rural economies and environments is a dangerous thing. Farms have always been important places where people live their lives and feed their communities, but now farmland is being repackaged into investment vehicles and traded as shares in markets remote from these communities. These changes raise concerns familiar from other domains; in private equity, these include short investment horizons, extractive strategies, diminished local accountability, and systemic opacity. Indeed, the transformation of farmland into a tradable asset can in many ways be understood as the most recent episode in a long and harmful pattern of rural extraction and alienation35—one that threatens to squeeze out next-generation rural residents and farmers from direct land ownership, causing real harm to local communities, economies, and environments.36 Critically, this is not a “rural versus urban” story. It is metropole versus periphery—the same extraction logic running through urban and suburban rental housing is now cannibalizing farmland in the countryside.37

Consider a prototypical case, in which organizers put land into special-purpose limited-liability companies (LLCs), carve those LLCs into membership units, and sell slices to private-equity funds, pensions, and endowments.38 Ownership fractures. Decision-making recenters far from the land itself—in boardrooms in Chicago or on a digital platform that translates field-level data into remotely issued directives. The metric that matters in these spaces is risk-adjusted return, not the particularized consequences facing local communities: whether a family can secure a lease, the soil is healthier in five years, or the school district can stay open. Financial actors operate within these legal regimes to transform material space into a financial product, and the law forms a new asset class out of land: property law makes the parcels modular; corporate law makes the owners distant and shielded; and securities law makes the shares liquid.39

We focus on farmland not only because of its central importance to human survival but also because of its political potential. Wall Street’s takeover of rural America is neither complete nor inevitable. The idea of the American farmer still carries powerful political weight.40 Movements have resisted concentrated land power before; this was true not only in the 1970s backlash to the Ag-Land Trust but remains true in today’s broad discomfort with foreign-owned farmland—although that discomfort is now disjointed and misplaced. Our intent here is not to inflame the same xenophobic rhetoric aimed only at “foreign” purchasers but to emphasize that some deep concern for the health and vitality of local rural communities and food systems remains.41 We also do not defend the status quo of high land prices that lock out newcomers and further entrench a highly racialized system of almost exclusively white farmland ownership (built on the erasure of a long history of racial and colonial violence).42 Our aim is the opposite: to lower barriers to entry for new resident farmers and build greater local control over democratic decision-making about how farmland is used and the food system functions.

Moreover, collective concern for farmland futures is not too late. A generational turnover of farmland is on the immediate horizon: more than a third of current farmers have already reached retirement age.43 Nearly half of U.S. farmland is expected to change ownership in the next two decades, and new people want to become farmers.44Yet, aspiring farmers and ranchers report an inability to acquire farmland as their single greatest obstacle to joining future-focused rural communities and reimagining food systems in more just and sustainable ways.45 Financialization is accelerating, but the window to reimagining these land-based relations remains open, at least for a short time.

We explore this ongoing process of farmland financialization in the following five parts. In Part I, we identify the economic conditions that make farmland a desirable investment target and, as importantly, the legal preconditions that create and facilitate the financialization of farmland. In Part II, we consider how this financialization reflects yet another chapter in a long history of exporting and exploiting resources from the periphery—that is, from rural and economically disadvantaged communities—for metropolitan rewards that benefit economically advantaged elites.46 Many of the commonly understood causes of rural decline flow from direct resource extraction or the decline of historic manufacturing industries. Making farmland an asset class follows a similar pattern, hollowing out rural labor and resources with consequences across social, political, ecological, and economic dimensions.47

In Part III, we explain how the prevailing legal regime enables farmland’s transition to an asset class.48 Acknowledging the hope of critical scholars in other disciplines that law might come in to save us from financialization’s threats, we emphasize that the pursuit of a remedy is more complex and layered than adding new doctrine on top of existing legal structures.49 In particular, we identify four deep legal undercurrents—(1) the dominance of market logics; (2) the abstraction of legal rights from physical reality; (3) a temporal bias favoring past and present entitlements over future needs; and (4) profound economic and political inequality—that powerfully bend law and market practices toward “capital formation” over all else, including sustaining rural communities and healthy food systems.50 Without attention to these structural power dynamics, piecemeal doctrinal interventions are unlikely to “save” rural America from farmland’s future as an asset class.

In Part IV, we examine historic attempts to reform these dynamics. We consider anti-corporate-farming laws, right-to-farm laws, securities-disclosure requirements, and limits on REITs. These efforts have so far proven ineffective in mitigating the expansion of farmland financialization. Neither property law nor financial regulation supplies a ready doctrinal solution. There is no “one simple trick that farm investors hate” that will meaningfully limit the financialized, absentee ownership of agricultural land. Indeed, experience suggests it is often paradoxical to fight fire with fire.51 Foundational structures of property, corporate, and securities law are designed to facilitate capital formation, not hinder it, rendering futile any attempts to combat the financialization of farmland with more financial regulation.52 It is therefore no surprise that interest groups have successfully evaded previous attempts at reform. Taken together, these dynamics amount to “playing shell games with finance”—a behavioral tactic adopted by investors to frustrate more meaningful engagement with the deep, procapital structures of property and corporate law.

So, what can innovative law and regulation do to address farmland’s transformation into an asset class? Legal tools are not entirely powerless or counterproductive, but they depend on deeper structural efforts to enable human flourishing outside of exclusively profit-focused metrics, including in rapidly depopulating rural spaces. We conclude Part V with a critique of what farmland financialization means for U.S. democracy and offer early thoughts on a range of specific legal reforms designed to remedy the harms produced by this process. Property and corporate law are influential drivers shaping the material worlds in which we live, and collectively we make choices at every juncture—in property law, corporate law, securities law, and other forms of private ordering—that shape the places we inhabit. Alternative choices exist, and we end with brief thoughts on achieving this more democratic vision of land relations.