Who’s Buying Nebraska? Corporations, investors grabbing giant chunks of Nebraska farmland – Flatwater Free Press

Nebraska Farmland Ownership: A Shift Towards Corporate Farms and Absentee Owners

There’s never a Black Friday discount when a piece of Nebraska farmland hits the market in 2023, be it a fertile field in the Platte River Valley or a vast swath of Sandhills pastureland.

The market’s hot. And corporate farms, both in-state and out, are dipping into their deep pockets to claim the increasingly pricey agricultural land they desire.

Corporate Buyers Dominate Nebraska Farmland Market

The nine buyers who spent the most money on Nebraska farmland in the past five years are all corporate farming operations, real estate developers, or investment firms, an analysis by the Flatwater Free Press found.

Jeff Burnett runs one of them. He keeps his eyes peeled for listings of Nebraska ranch land from his home near Cheyenne, Wyoming. His livestock and cattle operation recently paid $20 million for nearly 28,000 acres of ground in Keith County and Arthur County on the southern edge of the Sandhills.

That massive purchase made Burnett’s Wyoming-based operation the second-largest buyer of Nebraska land, by acre, in the past five years.

And, increasingly, small local farmers like Bill Alward strike out. Alward moved to his wife’s native Nebraska a few years ago and started a small operation, where he raises dozens of cattle and hogs near Fort Calhoun.

He’s trying to expand. He can’t afford it.

“There were some tracts that were available when we first moved here, and I kind of regret not pursuing those because now it’s completely off the table,” Alward says. “I mean, the price per acre … it’s insanity. There’s no way we can make that pencil out.”

Nebraska Farmland Prices Soar

The average price of Nebraska farmland has shot up 41% since 2018, to a record-high $3,835 per acre, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln annual survey.

The buyers of that land – especially the biggest chunks – include multinational corporations, out-of-state corporate farms, and investors who live hundreds or thousands of miles away, according to five years of land sales gathered by a UNL College of Journalism and Mass Communications data journalism class and analyzed by the Flatwater Free Press.

Seven of the top 10 buyers who spent the most money in the past five years – often for pricier farm ground or suburban development – are located outside Nebraska, the analysis shows.

Together, these seven out-of-state buyers spent $246 million on Nebraska land.

“(Investors are) competitively bidding it, alongside of area farmers and ranchers. And so these investors, to some degree, would cause some of that increase in price,” said Adam Pavelka, a Hastings broker and farm manager for Agri Affiliates, a Nebraska farm real estate agency.

The Flatwater Free Press spent months analyzing 12,700 sales of Nebraska farmland and ranch land made in the open market between 2018 and 2022, then chopping through a thicket of limited liability companies that often hide the actual buyer.

Key Findings on Nebraska Farmland Ownership

• The single biggest buyer scooping up the largest amount of ag land in Nebraska is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, through a nonprofit tied to a P.O. box in Utah.
• Great Plains Farms, headquartered in North Carolina, spent the most money, $65 million, on land in Cherry, Dawes, and Sheridan counties in northwest Nebraska. Belltown Farms, which ranks No. 2 in sale amount, is an organic farming company with operations in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Texas.
• Gov. Jim Pillen’s company Platte Center West was among the top spenders after acquiring hog farms, most in eastern Nebraska and some previously owned by The Maschhoffs, an Illinois-based corporate pork producer. The sale amount included buildings and other infrastructure in addition to the land itself.
• Some of the land purchased will no longer be farmland. The sales data show real estate developers acquiring farmland near Nebraska cities and towns to build homes and apartments. Tech companies like Facebook and Google have invested millions to turn land originally zoned agricultural into data centers.
• Oft-rumored foreign buyers of Nebraska land like China did not appear in the land sales data, but buyers from Canada and subsidiaries of several multinational corporations, including shipping behemoth ULINE, are among the top buyers of land.

There are caveats to these conclusions. The state property sales data, compiled from county assessors’ transaction records and provided by the Nebraska Department of Revenue, contain errors. The records sometimes list the incorrect sale amount. There are sometimes duplicate records, potentially inflating the total amount paid. Reporters at the Flatwater Free Press manually corrected some data points for top buyers but could not identify and weed out all data entry errors.

Impact on Rural Communities and Environment

The change in Nebraska’s farmland ownership structure can have a long-lasting impact on the environment, food production, local economies, and the lives and livelihoods of rural residents.

The rise of financial investors, aging of old farmers who rent out land, and farm family heirs who keep their family land but don’t farm anymore mean that many of today’s agricultural landowners aren’t personally doing the farmwork.

In some eastern Nebraska counties, more than half of the farmland is titled to an absentee owner, often farm family heirs and investors. The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture land ownership survey indicates that a third of Nebraska agricultural landlords have never farmed.

The growth of absentee owners is not unique to Nebraska. In neighboring Iowa, 27% of agricultural land purchases last year were connected to an investor buyer — including local farmers and non-local businesses — up from 21% in 2019, according to an Iowa State University survey.

These absentee owners do contribute to the local property tax base. But they don’t live in the community, go to the grocery store, or send their children to the local school.

Instead, they extract value from the land and send the profits elsewhere, which “can distort local economies and impair the health of rural communities,” said Jessica Shoemaker, a UNL law professor.

A higher rate of absent agricultural landowners in an area corresponds to a lower local employment rate, a 2021 USDA report found.

The USDA report identified no association between soil health and absentee owners. But some also worry that they aren’t the best stewards of Nebraska’s soil and water.

Absentee landowners have an opportunity to push for best farming practices, Johnson said.

“I think a lot of

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. No Poverty

• Target 1.4: By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership, and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology, and financial services including microfinance.
• Indicator 1.4.2: Proportion of total adult population with secure tenure rights to land, with legally recognized documentation and who perceive their rights to land as secure, by sex and by type of tenure.

2. Zero Hunger

• Target 2.3: By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists, and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets, and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment.
• Indicator 2.3.1: Volume of production per labor unit by classes of farming/pastoral/forestry enterprise size.

5. Gender Equality

• Target 5.a: Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance, and natural resources, in accordance with national laws.
• Indicator 5.a.1: (a) Proportion of total agricultural population with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land, by sex; and (b) share of women among owners or rights-bearers of agricultural land, by type of tenure.

8. Decent Work and Economic Growth

• Target 8.10: Strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions to encourage and expand access to banking, insurance, and financial services for all.
• Indicator 8.10.2: Proportion of adults (15 years and older) with an account at a bank or other financial institution or with a mobile-money-service provider.

11. Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Target 11.1: By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe, and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums.
• Indicator 11.1.1: Proportion of urban population living in slums, informal settlements, or inadequate housing.

15. Life on Land

• Target 15.3: By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought, and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world.
• Indicator 15.3.1: Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area.

Table: SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

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Source: flatwaterfreepress.org

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