Mormon church is Nebraska's 'top single buyer' of agricultural land over the past five years

Flatwater Free Press graphic

Mile after farm mile, Farmland Reserve Inc. has purchased large sections of Nebraska land. It has purchased so much land in Garden County, Nebraska, that the county assessor couldn't "calculate the nonprofit's total acres," reports Destiny Herbers of the Flatwater Free Press. "The organization simply owns too many parcels, through too many sales, for county officials to comb through the records." Garden County Assessor's Office told Herbers: 

Farmland Reserve, a nonprofit "owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, has been quietly buying up ranch land in Nebraska’s Sandhills for the past three decades," Herbers adds. "The Garden County shopping spree, coupled with more buys in four neighboring counties, made the church Nebraska’s top single buyer of land in the past five years."

The Mormon church has purchased 370,000 acres of "zoned agricultural land in Nebraska," Herbers reports. "The church sees its land buys as a force for good, an investment in agriculture to generate long-term value to support the church’s religious, charitable, and humanitarian good works,' said a Farmland Reserve spokesman. . . . The Nebraska Farmers Union sees the Church as another out-of-state corporation that arrives, drives up prices and makes buying harder for smaller farmers."

Since religious organizations don't have to "publicly report their income or assets, including real estate. The Church has never given a total accounting of their properties, in Nebraska or globally while amassing a fortune exceeding $100 billion," Herbers writes. "The Nebraska land is just one slice of the 1.7 million acres of American real estate the Mormon church is now estimated to own."

Some of the church's land holdings go back 30 years and are widely accepted as part of the state's active ranches. Rex Ranch, a "sprawling 365,000-acre cow-calf operation, that covers most of northern Garden County . . . has gone largely unnoticed by Nebraskans in the 30-plus years it’s been owned by the church," Herbers reports. Dale Bills, a spokesman for Farmland Reserve, said "the Rex, and its employees, are very much a part of the local community. The Rex’s employees live on the land they work and regularly participate in the Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association and Nebraska Grazing Lands Coalition."

Why all the land and ranching? Herbers explains, "The church’s focus on ranching comes down to two factors, a good economic investment, and preparedness for upheaval, said Betsy Gaines Quammen, historian, and author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West. Stockpiling food and resources to be prepared for upheaval before a religious event is a central part of Mormon theology, Quammen said."