After Years of Secretly Buying Up Land, Bill Gates Becomes Biggest Private Owner of Farmland in America After Years Of Buying Land, Bill Gates Becomes Biggest Owner Of Farmland In America
By Kipp Jones
Published January 17, 2021 at 10:35am
Bill Gates, the eccentric Microsoft co-founder who has no college degree but a lot of money — and interest in current events — is now the country’s largest private owner of farmland, and nobody seems to know why.
According to The Land Report, which tracks statistics on major property ownership, Gates and his wife, Melinda, over the years have quietly purchased 242,000 acres of farmland, and an additional 27,000 acres of non-farmland, across 19 states.
His U.S. real-estate portfolio includes swaths of fertile lands from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast.
Gates owns about 16,000 acres of lush plots in Washington state, 69,000 acres in Louisiana and 48,000 in Arkansas. He recently paid a hefty price tag of roughly $171 million for 14,500 acres in the Evergreen State, according to the Tri-City Herald.
While the website for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation states that the enterprise has a significant interest in “agricultural development,” it isn’t clear if any of the land owned by the techie is being used for that purpose.
Blurbs on the foundation’s website also offer little clarity on what any of that even means.
“We focus on four strategic goals that help drive agricultural transformation and that ensure this transformation is inclusive: increase agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers; increase smallholder farmer household income; increase equitable consumption of a safe, affordable, nutritious diet year-round; and increase women’s empowerment in agriculture,” the site says.
“Inclusive agricultural transformation is productivity-led growth in the smallholder sector that spurs rural sector economic growth and delivers broad and accelerated impacts favoring the poor, especially women. We invest in this sector because economic growth that focuses on agriculture and that increases the incomes of smallholder farmers is particularly effective in reducing poverty, more so than investments in other sectors,” the site adds.
The site goes on to talk about climate change, gender disparities and touches a lot on the agricultural situation in Africa. But people who are reading the news that the guy behind Windows now is the largest farmer/potential non-farmer in the country don’t quite know what to think.
Speculation about Gates’ activities is endless:
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Poster Comment:
Bill Gates wants to reduce the world population to "more sustainable levels" of 500,000,000. How about we start the process with him.