The United States has exactly one national register of foreign-held land, and it covers only agriculture. It says foreign persons hold 46.3M acres — 3.6% of all privately held agricultural land, an area larger than Washington State — and that the total has nearly doubled since 2010. Thirty state legislatures are writing laws about this number. Almost nobody reads the register it comes from.
Since 1978, the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) has required any foreign person acquiring an interest in US agricultural land to file form FSA-153 with USDA. The filings become an annual report to Congress and, since 2023, a set of public spreadsheets — one row per holding, county by county. We aggregated all fifteen years of them (20,328 holdings in 2010, 49,548 in 2024) into a single openly licensed dataset: acres by investor country, by state, by land use, by kind of interest, over time. What the register shows is quieter and stranger than the debate around it.
The register does not show what the debate assumes
The argument is about adversaries; the acreage is about allies. Canada alone reports 16.1M acres — 34% of all foreign-held US agricultural land, much of it Maine timberland. The next largest holders are the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The four statutory countries of concern together hold well under one percent: China reports 247,659.2 acres — 0.5% of foreign-held land, roughly 0.02% of all US agricultural land — while Iran reports 547 acres, Russia 11, and North Korea zero. Chinese-associated holdings peaked in 2023 and fell in 2024.
The concentration is corporate and knowable. USDA itself names the five companies behind 92% of Chinese-associated acreage — led by Brazos Highland Properties LP (86,994 acres) and two Smithfield Foods subsidiaries — and our dataset republishes exactly those names, as the government publishes them, and no others.
What “held” actually means
The headline number is not an ownership number. The FSA-153 form does not distinguish an outright purchase from a lease of ten years or longer, so a Danish wind developer leasing turbine pads on an American rancher's land files the same way as a timber company buying a forest. In the 2024 file, 64% of reported acres are fee ownership; USDA attributes 10.6 million acres — roughly a quarter of the total — to wind-energy leases, of which less than 1% is owned outright. Strip the leases and the picture changes shape. Any serious use of this data has to say which number it is using.
The register itself is the finding
The sharpest fact in the data is the condition of the data. GAO reviewed the register in 2024 at the request of 130 members of Congress and found the largest China-associated holding double-counted, 918 holdings with no country attached at all, and manual paper filings keyed in without sufficient internal controls. USDA describes its own figures as reported minimums; FSA warns the historical spreadsheets contain errors it will not retroactively fix. Enforcement barely exists — a FOIA review found ten penalties totaling $115,724 assessed across an entire decade. The register captures only the first ownership tier, so the listed investor may not be the ultimate parent. And in the 2024 file, nearly three million acres sit under “no predominant country” or “no foreign investor listed” — a bucket that has grown almost six-fold since 2010, three times faster than the register itself. The attribution rule cuts one level deep, and the same corporate family can surface under two flags: holdings of the ChemChina-owned Syngenta seed group are attributed to China in ten states and Switzerland in five others in the same federal file. The one instrument the United States has for answering “who owns American farmland” is a self-reported form that was, for years, effectively unpoliced — and this was the register the Fufeng Group filed to, late, when it bought land near Grand Forks Air Force Base.
The states stopped waiting
While the federal register stayed a paper filing, 26 states enacted or strengthened laws restricting foreign acquisition of land — most since 2023, most aimed at “foreign adversary” ownership — and the federal machinery is finally moving too: an electronic filing portal launched in January 2026, and a reporting overhaul reached the proposed-rule stage in June 2026. The register that lawmakers spent fifty years ignoring is suddenly load-bearing. That is exactly when a public record most needs to be readable.
Method, and a hard line
The dataset aggregates the USDA FSA detailed holdings files for 2010–2024 (public domain) to country × state × year, verified against the published annual report — our computed agricultural total matches USDA's 46.3 million to the first decimal. One rule governs it: the source register names private individuals; this dataset never does. Individual filers — 2% of reported acreage — appear only inside aggregate totals, and the only named holders are the companies USDA's own report names. Every figure links to its federal source, including the ten documented defects of the register itself.
The data: Foreign-Held U.S. Farmland — 109 investor countries, every state, 15 years, keyless JSON, CC0.
Related writing: The Shell Game in the Farmland Register — the attribution gap in depth: flagged secondary interests, split attributions, and the unattributed acres.
Related writing: Thirty States Banned Foreign Farmland Ownership — the 2023-2025 law wave and its incompatible definitions.
Related writing: Treasury TIC capital flows — who holds US securities, the financial mirror of this question.
Related writing: BEA international transactions — foreign direct investment in the national accounts.