Federal laws likely undercount foreign farmland ownership

Foreign companies own more than 10 million acres of American farmland, but the real number is likely higher. "Despite a federal law requiring foreign transactions of agricultural land be reported to and recorded by the federal government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s database appears to be missing significant acres of land," Jamie Grey, Emily Featherston, Lee Zurik, Jon Decker and Cory Johnson report for Gray Television's Investigate TV. "Records of who owns what don’t match. Reconciling federal, state and county records on land ownership is all but impossible. It is unclear whether the discrepancies originate from the companies’ reporting, the forms or the USDA’s recording of the land."

The Agriculture Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, passed in 1978, required the USDA to track foreign ownership of farmland, but the data collected under that law appears to be incomplete. Foreign companies or individuals that buy American farmland are supposed to fill out a form reporting it to the USDA, but Investigate TV found numerous discrepancies when they tried matching federal data with county assessors' records.

"In recent decades, no federal legislation to drastically change the tracking or sale of farmland has passed," Investigate TV reports. "State and federal lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have pushed for changes – from locking down the sale of agricultural land to foreign entities to forcing increased transparency and mandating more accurate record-keeping."

Another reason it's hard to reconcile the database with county records: USDA's definitions for some data fields are sometimes incorrectly identified or inconsistent with county definitions. "When InvestigateTV asked the USDA to provide data definitions to help clarify the discrepancies, an agency spokesperson provided two, un-dated data fields keys, which in some cases either contain fields not included in the data sets, or are missing fields," Investigate TV reports. "When asked which data fields correspond to Farm Services Administration Form-153, the document farms use to report foreign ownership and is the source for the AFIDA database, the spokesperson provided a 'rough' breakdown, but said: 'We don’t have anything specific to identify which sections of the form correspond to the data fields in the database.'"