Who’s Buying Nebraska? Corporations, investors grabbing giant chunks of Nebraska farmland
Who’s Buying Nebraska Corporations, investors grabbing giant chunks of Nebraska farmland KOLN
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Nebraska Nonprofit Owned by Mormon Church Becomes Top Land Purchaser
LINCOLN, Neb. (Flatwater Free Press) – Early in the summer of 2018, a nonprofit few Nebraskans have heard of bought a 22,613-acre chunk of land in Garden County.
The next year, the nonprofit, tied to a P.O. Box in Salt Lake City, picked up another 3,331 acres of county land, buying it from a Colorado investment company.
The unknown nonprofit grabbed two more pieces of county land on the same day in March 2020, adding 10,278 acres to its mushrooming total. Then, two years later, it added still more land in this rural Nebraska county tucked between Chimney Rock and Lake McConaughy.
Before anyone really knew it, the nonprofit owned most of northern Garden County.
Not even the assessor could calculate the nonprofit’s total acres, an employee in the Garden County Assessor’s Office said. The organization simply owns too many parcels, through too many sales, for county officials to comb through the records.
“You’ll have to ask Farmland Reserve Inc.,” she said politely before hanging up the phone.
The Mormon Church’s Land Purchases in Nebraska
Farmland Reserve Inc., a nonprofit owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, has been quietly buying up ranch land in Nebraska’s Sandhills for the past three decades.
The Garden County shopping spree, coupled with more buys in four neighboring counties, made the church Nebraska’s top single buyer of land in the past five years.
The church bought a whopping 57,500 acres – double the amount of the second largest buyer– between 2018 and 2022, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of data gathered by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications data journalism class.
The Mormon Church now owns about 370,000 total acres of zoned agricultural land in Nebraska. It could soon become Nebraska’s largest landowner – passing Ted Turner, who has famously long occupied that No. 1 spot – if church representatives continue to buy land at their current pace.
How much land is 370,000 acres? It’s almost exactly the total amount of land in Douglas and Sarpy counties combined.
(Photos by Ryan Soderlin for the Flatwater Free Press)(Ryan Soderlin | Ryan Soderlin)
The Church’s Perspective and Land Usage
The church sees its land buys as a force for good, an investment in agriculture “to generate long-term value to support the Church’s religious, charitable, and humanitarian good works,” said a Farmland Reserve spokesman.
The nonprofit owned by the church also pays property taxes like any other ag producer in the state, and state and federal income taxes, too, the spokesman noted – though an unknown amount of revenue is given to the church itself, which doesn’t have to pay taxes on passive investments.
The Nebraska Farmers Union sees the church as another out-of-state corporation that arrives, drives up prices and makes buying harder for smaller farmers.
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