Ag Report: Limiting foreign ownership of U.S. farmland

COLUMBUS — Foreign ownership of U.S. farmland is causing concern, and lawmakers are implementing laws to limit the practice.

According to a USDA report, “Foreign persons held an interest in over 43.4 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of December 31, 2022. This is 3.4 percent of all privately held agricultural land and nearly 2 percent of all land in the United States.”

For Ohio, that number is 2.7%.

Peggy Kirk Hall, J.D., is the Director of The Ohio State University’s Agricultural and Resource Law Program.

She discussed a 2023 Ohio law that limits who can purchase farmland.

“And what that law does now is prohibit ownership of land by certain persons. So in order to know which persons cannot own land in Ohio, the Ohio Secretary of State is to prepare a registry of those persons,” she said. “And that registry contains those who would be considered to be threats to land ownership in Ohio. That registry is now up and available on the Ohio Secretary of State’s website. And any person or entity on any of those lists on that registry would be prohibited from holding on to land ownership if they obtained that land after the law’s effective date of October 23rd of last year.”

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