Food, Climate, or Power? Why Is Bill Gates Buying up Farmland on a Massive Scale?Bill Gates is now America's biggest farmland owner. The tech billionaire's quietest investment reveals his most urgent plan.
Published on September 2, 2025
On one hand, there is the stated mission of his foundation. Through initiatives like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he has championed the distribution of high-yield, patented seeds and fertilizers to smallholder farmers.
The goal was noble: to double incomes and halve food insecurity. The results, however, have been widely criticized as a “crushing failure,” often trapping farmers in cycles of debt for annual seed purchases while failing to deliver on its promises. His U.S. land holdings could serve as vast North American laboratories for developing the very agricultural technologies—perhaps including climate-resistant GMOs—he aims to deploy abroad.
But here’s the catch: this mission is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed financial calculus. Giants of finance, from Warren Buffett—who first identified farmland as a profoundly undervalued asset—to massive investment funds like Vanguard and BlackRock, have been snapping up agricultural land for years. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 30% of American farmland is now owned by non-farmer landlords.
The phenomenon is hardly confined to the American Midwest or to Bill Gates. It is a global gold rush for dirt. From the Brazilian cerrado to the Ukrainian steppe, financial institutions and billionaires like Jeff Bezos are acquiring vast swaths of arable land. The situation in Ukraine is particularly stark, where by August 2022, Western private financiers owned a staggering 28% of the country’s territory.
This land is often leased back to local farmers, but the terms of engagement are set by distant owners and the major agrochemical corporations—like Bayer-Monsanto and DuPont—that frequently accompany them, creating a new form of agricultural imperialism.
This gets to the heart of the skepticism Gates faces in places like North Dakota, where a recent purchase of 850 hectares from a local potato farm ignited a firestorm of local opposition. Communities watch warily as a billionaire with no roots in their soil gains control over their most vital resource and primary economic engine. They fear a loss of sovereignty, where what gets planted—be it a patented bioengineered seed or a water-intensive cash crop—is decided in a boardroom a continent away, not by the farmer who feels the soil in his hands.
Food, Climate, or Power? Why Is Bill Gates Buying up Farmland on a Massive Scale?
His two biggest endeavors are GMO crops and vaccine. Hence, his non-existent "pivot" from climate change to areas in which he's invested. |
