The Truth About Why Bill Gates Keeps Buying Up So Much Farmland

Bill Gates and conspiracy theories go together like peanut butter and jelly. The billionaire can’t seem to do anything without drawing the conspiratorial ire of online netizens. One of the more colorful theories pertains to Gates’s strange interest in U.S. agriculture, with rumors that the former Microsoft CEO owns upward of 80 percent of farmland in the United States.

Amazing, if true—but it’s extremely not. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) last week, Gates once again fielded a question pertaining to his AG holdings and stated that he actually only owns 1/4000 of all U.S. farmland, or about 270,000 acres spread across 18 different states. Although nowhere near 80 percent of U.S. farmland, it’s still a little more than one-third of the state of Rhode Island, a surprising amount for one person and enough to make Gates the largest landowner in the U.S.

So why does Bill Gates, and other billionaires like him, keep buying up so much farmland?

Some Things Bill Gates Is Doing

Some experts have pointed to Gates’s well-known sustainability and green tech initiatives as a possible reason, but during an earlier Reddit AMA in 2021, Gates said, “my investment group chose to do this. It is not connected to climate.” That’s because the old adage goes: “Buy land—they aren’t making it anymore.” (Which volcanologists know isn’t exactly true, but you get the idea).

Starting in 2013, Gates began investing his billions (through the firm Cascade Investment) in agriculture because of its steady increase in value and low volatility. According to Mother Jones, the average price of farmland increased six times from 1940 to 2015, and the trend is likely to continue as the amount of arable land in the U.S. continues to shrink from climate-related pressures.

However, this practice of buying up agricultural land predates Bill Gates and has been a popular investment for the super-rich since at least the early 2000s. The financial crisis later in that same decade prompted an explosion of investments into farmland when monetary safe havens became scarce.

Although Gates owns these farms, he isn’t changing their practices. Instead, he mostly acts like a landlord and allows professional farmers to keep doing their thing—even if those practices are ruinous to the environment. Similar to private equity firms destabilizing the housing market, millionaires and billionaires investing in farmland are also creating their own set of issues, as they are now pricing out young farmers looking to buy land.

Will Bill Gates’s green tech initiatives ever intersect with his growing agricultural empire? Who knows. In that same Reddit AMA from 2021, the one where Gates separated his land investments from his sustainability initiatives, he also mentioned the importance of “productive seeds” to avoid deforestation as well as the production of biofuels, which relies heavily on corn, in the very same answer.

For now, Gates’s ever-expanding farmland ownership is really just “rich guy doing rich guy things,” and while concerning in a late-stage capitalism sort of way, it isn’t as cartoonishly nefarious as some conspiratorial corners of the internet want to believe.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.