Timberlands now account for 47% of U.S. agricultural lands owned by foreigners, with more than 1.3 million acres of forest and farmland being snapped up by foreign interests in the 12 months to December 2024. That is according to a new report published by the US Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, which reveals that foreign ownership has increased exponentially, from 26.8 million acres in 2017 to more than 48 million acres in just eight years, largely due to a surge of investment in forests and cropland.
And whilst foreigners have secured lands in all 50 States (plus Puerto Rico), Texas (which has sold more than 5.9 million acres) and Maine (with 3.5 million acres) are the dominant states where overseas interests have bought forests. “In terms of percentages, approximately 21.3 per cent of Maine’s privately held agricultural land is held by foreign investors; this is approximately 7.6 per cent of the reported foreign-held agricultural land in the United States,” the report said.
As for country of origin, “Canadian investors own the largest amount of reported foreign-held agricultural and non-agricultural land, with 34 per cent, or 16.1 million acres,” the report said. “Foreign persons from an additional four countries, the Netherlands with 10 per cent, Germany with 6 per cent, Italy with 6 per cent, and the United Kingdom with 6 per cent, collectively held nearly 12.8 million acres or 27 per cent of the foreign-held acres in the United States.”
“The remaining 18.3 million acres, or 39 per cent of all reported foreign-held agricultural and non-agricultural land, are held by various other countries. For example, Chinese investors held nearly 248,000 acres (see Report 11), which is slightly less than 1 per cent of foreign-held acres.”
The latest figures come after Wood Central revealed in early 2024 that a Chinese tech billionaire with government links has secretly acquired 280,000 hectares of North American forests and is leading a push by overseas interests to buy up forest land for timber production and carbon capture. Those findings come from The Land Report, which lists Tianqiao Chen, founder of the Chinese online gaming giant Shanda Interactive Entertainment, as the second-largest “foreign owner of North American lands” and the largest owner of a single forest in the US.
In recent years, US officials have cracked down on the surge of overseas investors into US agriculture, with the USDA expanding its monitoring and disclosure systems under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act and several states moving to restrict certain types of overseas acquisitions.
