The Soil Is for Sale
During high summer, I do my best to get up early and be out in the field with the sheep before the sun reaches its full power. From May to October, I move them onto fresh pasture every few days, a rhythm that keeps me attuned to the needs of the land and disperses their manure evenly without allowing them to compact or overgraze any one section. A field like this feeds more than the livestock that graze it. Throughout the growing season, it offers nourishment for countless insects, pollinators, reptiles, ground-nesting birds, water tables, and traveling wildlife. The fertile soil, chest-high grasses, and flowers offer refuge for all of us here on the ridge.
As I survey the awakened landscape, my gratitude for the living gifts of this world shifts to grief. The troubling reality of our times pours into my awareness like an unexpected flood. Increasingly, land like this is disappearing. Not necessarily because it’s gone barren, but because it’s been sold off to the highest bidder and removed from the fabric of working agriculture.
In the United States today, nearly 30 percent of farmland, over 280 million acres, is owned by people who do not farm it. Some live a county away, others a continent away. The living soil owned within their deeds has become an asset class, a line in an investment portfolio to be flipped, leased, or held until its value increases. The soil is for sale, and it’s vanishing. Acre by acre, the ground is being abstracted, converted into a commodity you can trade, flip, or hold without ever touching it yourself. Decisions for use of the land are being made by people who do not know it, and this growing disconnect has dire consequences for agriculture, the natural world, and our own communities.
Land as Commodity
As our culture continues to move away from a relational, symbiotic dynamic with the land toward a material, capitalistic possession of the land, our world changes. Land commodification, the treatment of soil as an asset to be bought, sold, and leveraged for profit, has become so normalized that many no longer question it. The quiet transfer of farmland from working farmers and stewards to absentee owners, investment funds, and developers is reshaping not just the global agricultural economy, but the very culture of our farming communities here in the United States.
There are several forces driving this shift. Absentee ownership of land now accounts for a significant share of U.S. farmland. In 2014, about 39 percent of farmland in the contiguous United States was leased out, and 80 percent of that land was owned by non-operating landlords. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines “absent landlords” as those living more than 100 miles away, and while many live closer, this form of ownership is most common in regions of the country with lower rent prices and weaker economic development. Studies have linked higher absentee ownership rates with slower per-capita income growth, and significantly lower adoption of regenerative practices like cover cropping, especially with short-term leases.
Investor and developer speculation have also accelerated since the pandemic’s rural land rush. Farmland, valued at around $2.6 trillion and comprising over 80 percent of U.S. agricultural assets, has caught the eye of institutional investors, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts. Entities like Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), private equity firms, and high-net-worth individuals see farmland as a stable, appreciating asset. Even if they never intend to visit the land, make improvements, or farm it themselves, the return on investment is destined to grow.
The recurring headlines about Bill Gates’s farmland holdings, whether the acreage is precisely known or obscured by complex ownership structures, have crystallized this broader trend: farmland is increasingly treated as a capital investment rather than the vulnerable, imperiled source of all sustenance and community and planetary well-being.
As the commodification grows, corporate acquisitions extend beyond domestic billionaires. By the end of 2023, China owned over 277,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, with a valuation leap from $81 million in 2010 to $1.9 billion in 2022. In response to these acquisitions, several Midwestern states have passed anti-corporate farming laws, and in 2023, the federal Farmland for Farmers Act was introduced to restrict corporate and investment-fund ownership. These same laws limit nonprofit farmland ownership in these states, as nonprofit land trusts are considered corporations. These laws are also circumvented by complex ownership structures framed as “family farms” that are in reality multimillion-dollar industrial enterprises. State and federal programs continue to fuel land price increases through incentives that favor large-scale operators over small to midsize farms, unintentionally accelerating the trend.
The human cost of this commodification is immense. Inflated land prices fracture local food systems, displace or block young farmers, force elder farmers with limited options and no retirement to sell their life’s work to pay off debts, and further marginalize and separate Indigenous and multigenerational stewards from the land. It continues a long history of dispossession, especially for Black farmers, who since 1910 have lost roughly 80 percent of their land, mostly through the vulnerabilities of heirs’ property, where unclear titles made land easy to force into sale. In 1910, Black farmers operated around 16 million acres; by 2023, that figure had fallen below 3 million.
As more U.S. farmland is held by absentee owners and institutional investors, land is redirected away from the communities and growers who would bring their local region and ecology the most benefit. Each transfer that severs ownership from stewardship erodes the incentive to invest in the soil’s long-term health and further separates the human population from the life force needed to sustain it.
Holding Land in Common
Even as corporate acquisitions become more of a threat to our farmland and natural habitats, we have not yet passed the point of no return. The 2022 USDA Agriculture Survey found that 60 percent of farmland in the United States was still owned by farmers, and according to American Farmland Trust, over 4.1 million acres of farm and ranchland have been permanently protected across 33 states. Farmers, nature enthusiasts, social and environmentally conscious businesses, conservation organizations, nonprofits, Indigenous communities, and private citizens are all coming together to halt the unraveling of our regenerative, natural world.
In stark contrast to the asset hoarding being done by capitalist institutions, there are many private citizens who are inheriting and investing in land and are dedicated to securing its protection and stewardship. To explore this prospect further, I reached out to Julian Lauzzana, founder of the Earthen Heart Initiative in Michigan. Julian is a man of many interests and passions. He is a wonderful blend of head and heart, and his adventurous and reverent spirit has led him down a path that scarcely resembles the corporate manufacturing ownership background he came from. His European ancestors worked hard and developed a prosperous manufacturing business during the Industrial Revolution, which afforded him the opportunity to champion systems and ideas he believes in.
Drawing inspiration from his time farming in Mexico, his deep dive into community living at Arcosanti—the world’s first prototype arcology in Arizona—his broad media career in New York City (which included video, film, radio, and theater), and his time running an art gallery in Boston, Julian has a wide breadth of life experiences. He now draws on all of them as he shapes the most harmonious future for his beloved land holdings in Michigan.
Julian is the owner and steward of several regenerative properties in southwestern Michigan: a 20-acre perennial crop farm in Bangor, a 70-acre orchard in South Haven, and a one-acre permaculture oasis homestead in Kalamazoo. He also tends a nearby one-acre lot destined to become a community food forest and the site of a modest ecobuilding. After exploring ecovillage options on the West Coast, Julian moved back to Michigan with his partner at the time and their blended family of seven children. Together, they continued searching for a way to unite people, community, and the nourishing and healing power of a diversified landscape. When attempts to join existing communities didn’t align, they decided to start their own from scratch.
While he holds a passion for growing plants and generating a diversified harvest, he doesn’t identify as a farmer. Julian explains, “I am more of a gardener than a farmer. I tried for a couple years with a blueberry crop, but I’ve come to accept that I do my best work in the kitchen. That’s where I really get to it. I make cider, vinegar, sauerkraut, juices, dehydrated fruits and vegetables, and so on. That’s my sweet spot.” There is a lot of wisdom to be gained from recognizing your role in the great scheme of things, and Julian has always known that truly taking care of the land requires community support.
As he looks to the future of his land holdings, he knows he’d like the land to be preserved as beautiful living, working examples of regenerative agriculture, with a focus on production for use over production for sale. Julian’s focus with the land is not on monetary gain, but on food security and true community well-being. Julian reflects, “We should honor the workers who harvest as much as we honor the farmers and landowners. This is why I am drawn to Tolstoy and the Zapatistas and the Ejidos of Mexico. Those who work the land should have some rights to stay on the land. This is the biggest piece for me, my biggest motivation. Those who put in the work should be rewarded.”
Julian is currently working with The Farmers Land Trust to create and incubate the Earthen Heart Farmland Commons. He believes that the Farmland Commons model championed by The Farmers Land Trust creates a secure scaffolding for the development of a community-held resource while preserving active farmland in perpetuity. “I want to do something like radical hospitality on a different scale. It used to be a person produced food or products and did a little abundance sharing with their friends and family, and they received a little abundance in return. Add skill sharing into this, and people can really take care of each other. Community homesteading, maximizing community synergy.”
Visionary land investors like Julian have an essential role to play in the ongoing preservation of the vulnerable resources of our living planet. By buying property and then protecting it through title ownership held in nonprofit Commons through The Farmers Land Trust, the invaluable plantings and native ecology of his properties will continue to generate benefits for the local community and ecosystems now and in the future. By putting his land into community-aligned, nonprofit ownership, it is protected from the speculative real estate market. His choice to share his privilege with the world is a gift to all and will no doubt inspire others to give with heart and intention. Julian reflects, “It’s my honor, my privilege to be placed at such a junction as this. Privilege has got a bad name these days. For me, it’s the same as honor. It is my honor, my privilege to share from the gifts I have been given.”
Land as Kin
As I walk up from the pasture into the orchard, among the various fruit and nut trees we’ve planted over the last five years, I feel connected to Julian. The gratitude I feel for the Earth and its endless wonders of regeneration returns to me and extends to people who are using whatever means they have to engage with the preservation of farmland and wild habitat, even in the face of the all-consuming, capitalist machine. Even if my life depended on it, I could scarcely bring myself to think of this symbiotic, ecological community sprouting forth endlessly from this piece of land as something to be traded for financial return.
For me, kinship is not just found in the realm of humans. Kinship is woven into the very fabric of our reality, and I believe our survival depends on our willingness to come to terms with that fact.
Teaser image credit: Farmers Land Trust logo. Author supplied.