In late June, the North Dakota Attorney General approved the purchase of 2,100 acres of farmland by a company tied to Bill Gates. Red River Trust bought it from potato growers Campbell Farms for about $13.5 million. According to legal documents obtained by FOX Business, the sale was made last November.

Media reports suggest that the reaction of locals to the deal was far from positive. “I’ve gotten a big earful on this from clear across the state, it’s not even from that neighborhood. Those people are upset, but others are just livid about this,” North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring told local television station KFYR. Other concerns cited in the media insist that “ultra-rich who buy land in North Dakota… do not necessarily share the state’s values.”

Before it was revealed that the deal had been approved, the office of the Attorney General sent Red River Trust a letter asking how the company planned to use the land. “In North Dakota… all corporations or limited liability companies (LLC) are prohibited from owning or leasing farmland or ranchland, and from engaging in farming or ranching. In addition, the law places certain limitations on the ability of trusts to own farmland or ranchland. The Corporate or Limited Liability Company Farming Law has certain exemptions, such as permitting registered family farms or allowing the use of the land for business purposes…”

“Our office needs to confirm how your company uses this land and whether this use meets any of the statutory exceptions, such as the business purpose exception…”

The letter required an answer within 30 days, but there’s no information about whether Red River Trust had anything to reply.

‘Meet Farmer Bill’

The news of the purchase made headlines, as many people found it surprising that the Microsoft co-founder is spending so much money on agriculture. Still, the North Dakota case is just the latest example of a billionaire’s investment in farmland making big news.

Summarizing the data as of 2020, a magazine called The Land Report put Bill Gates’ photo on its cover with the caption ‘Meet Farmer Bill’. The outlet called Gates and his then-wife Melinda “America’s largest private farmland owners.” In tracking the history of Gates’ investments, The Land Report cited a 2014 article from the Wall Street Journal about a man named Michael Larson, who, according to the outlet, has managed the billionaire’s investment empire since 1994, “mostly through a firm called Cascade Investment LLC.”

“The Wyoming ranch is part of a bet by Cascade on the steep rebound in real-estate prices since the financial crisis,” the WSJ reported, citing its sources. “The firm owns at least 100,000 acres of farmland in California, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana and other states – or an area seven times bigger than Manhattan.”

In 2021, The Land Report said that Gates owned almost 269,000 acres across the country.

‘Why are you buying so much farmland?’

The same year, Reddit users had a chance to ask the Microsoft co-founder about the reasons behind such a large investment. The question was “hey Bill! Why are you buying so much farmland?”

“My investment group chose to do this. It is not connected to climate,” Gates replied. “The agriculture sector is important. With more productive seeds we can avoid deforestation and help Africa deal with the climate difficulty they already face. It is unclear how cheap biofuels can be but if they are cheap they can solve the aviation and truck emissions.”

The uproar over Gates’ latest land purchase created a wave of discussion online. During the height of the Covid pandemic, the Microsoft co-founder was often in the limelight due to his pronouncements about the virus, and even became the subject of conspiracy theories. So, there’s no surprise that his unusual investment unleashed online gossip as well, sparking rumors that the billionaire owns the majority of US farmland. Actually, there are some 895 million acres of farmland in the country. So even while being the largest private farmland owner, Gates actually has less than 1% of the country’s total. And, no matter how eccentric the Microsoft co-founder can be, the reasons behind his farmland investment are most likely mundane, experts say.

“If you look at farmland purchases in the United States, the overwhelming majority is acquired by farmers. The next largest group are people somehow close to farming, like retired farmers, or people from the rural area that are interested in purchasing land. People who put together large portfolios are pretty rare,” Todd H. Kuethe, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University in the US, told RT. “Usually, they’re buying it for the financial position and so that land usually stays in production. There’s no disappearance of that land.”

Stable asset

Still, Bill Gates’ years-long investment in land elicited a question from analysts: Is farmland such an attractive asset? The answer is yes, for several reasons: farmland is a limited resource, offers strong returns, and is a stable and low-risk asset. Interest in farmland is rising, and prices are climbing accordingly. Last year’s data show the value of US farm real estate has averaged $3,380 per acre, up 7% compared with 2020.

“The US farmland has been increasing in price in recent years because of high returns and low-interest rates,” Carl Zulauf, a professor emeritus in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University, explained to RT. “The high returns have been from the market and from government programs.”

Kuethe agrees: “It's a really nice thing to be added to a broad investment portfolio, to give you some of those diversification advantages. Farmland is an attractive investment, and a lot of folks see the value of adding it to an investment portfolio. It’s a relatively lower risk than investing in equities or buying individual stocks, but it offers a little bit higher return than just bond purchases. So, it sits in the middle – a financial investment where you can get a little bit higher return, but not that much additional risk.”

After all, stability seems to mean a lot nowadays. Years of the Covid-19 pandemic, marked by lockdowns, and the current conflict in Ukraine, which disrupted trade, particularly of grain supplies, made more countries look carefully at their food security. Still, Kuethe thinks that all of these factors are not enough to make individual businessmen buy land for personal consumption. “I don’t think that investors are looking for farming for their own consumption, they’re still looking at producing commodities for the global market,” he says. “I don’t have the concern that people are going to start buying up land and wanting to farm themselves because they’re worried about food insecurity.”

Bill Gates wants ‘rich nations’ to switch to 100% SYNTHETIC beef to save the planet

The world’s third-richest man is shifting from preaching about pandemics to promoting his new book about climate change, urging humanity to embrace the sci-fi idea of fake meat in order to save the earth from greenhouse gases.

Tuesday saw the publication of 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,' the new book by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. In one of the interviews promoting the book, he argued for cutting down the levels of methane by getting rid of livestock and replacing it with the science-fiction trope of vat-grown meat.

“I do think all rich countries should move to 100 percent synthetic beef,” Gates told Technology Review in an article published Sunday. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”

The idea is to lower the emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas produced by grazing animals such as cows or sheep as they digest grass. Praising the technological achievements in agriculture and bioengineering, Gates said there was no other way but to eliminate livestock, even as he admitted that telling people “You can’t have cows anymore” is a “politically unpopular approach to things.”

Unpopular is one way to describe it, judging by the reaction to his proposals, which have ranged from telling Gates to “take a hike” to much less printable things.

“You'll be eating the 3D printed plastic meat, not him and his Davos friends,” tweeted commentator Paul Joseph Watson, noting that Gates is a carnivore who admitted hamburgers are his favorite food.

That’s not a random observation, either, as vat-grown chicken sold for about $50 a nugget when it was first served at a luxury restaurant in Singapore, back in December 2020. 

Actual animals are far more efficient than any human-developed technology, as one Twitter jokester pointed out when he pitched “a fully-functional beef-producing self-replicating cellulose-to-protein bio-reactor” – also known as a cow.

Watson added that Gates is “putting countless farmers out of business, while he buys up record amounts of farmland and monopolizes global food production.” He wasn’t the only one, as others pointed out that Gates has by now acquired 268,000 acres of land across 19 US states.

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) took a different tack, saying that Americans “will be eating real beef for a while since we’re $27.9 trillion in debt,” and Gates only wants “rich” nations to make the switch.

Massie actually knows a thing or two about farming himself, raising chickens and other animals on his 1,000-acre homestead, powered by solar panels and Tesla batteries. 

Gates, meanwhile, lives in a 66,000-square-foot mansion in Washington state and consumes 486 gallons of fuel per hour of flying in his private jet, according to a blistering critique of his book and environmentalist efforts in Nation magazine.

For all that global warming has been renamed “climate change,” environmentalists remain obsessed with the notion that the planet is warming thanks to human activity, which must be stopped at all costs. 

In 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) was mocked for rolling out a 'Green New Deal' proposal that would get rid of “farting cows and airplanes” over the course of a decade, only to be blasted by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore as a “pompous twit” who would “get us all killed.” Current US President Joe Biden now appears to have adopted the ambitious carbon emission proposal in all but name.

Gates doesn’t seem to be entirely on board the green revolution, however, as he told Australian media this week that “nuclear fission and fusion are really the only things that can work” to generate 25 percent of electricity independent of the weather, which wind and solar can’t do without “a miracle invention” of far cheaper batteries to store the energy year-round.

As he was saying this, millions of Texans found themselves without power, with much of the state’s wind and solar capabilities rendered useless during unusually severe snow and ice storm.

References:

rt.com