Who Owns the Farm?

Measured by value rather than area, the concentration is sharper still. The International Land Coalition’s 2020 report Uneven Ground, produced with Oxfam, found that the richest 10 per cent of the rural population in the countries it sampled captured 60 per cent of agricultural land value, while the poorest half controlled 3 per cent. Once land value and landlessness were counted, inequality came out 41 per cent higher than traditional census measures suggested. In the European Union, fewer than 3 per cent of farms now account for more than half of the farmed land.

The League Table of Land

No official register ranks the world’s farmland holders. The table below draws together the best documented figures from company reports, national rankings and specialist trackers. Each figure has a different basis, which is part of the story.

Set against an island, the numbers become concrete. Jamaica’s total land area is roughly 1.1 million hectares. In 2007 all the land in Jamaican farms, every yam hill and cane piece, came to 325,810 hectares. Bill Gates’s American landholding alone is equal to about a third of that.

Why There Is No Honest Top 100

A ranking of landowners sounds simple. It is not. BEFL counts land a company controls by ownership, lease or any other legal title. The Australian Agricultural Company’s figure covers both owned and leased stations. The Land Report counts deeded acres in the United States, including ranch and timber land. SLC Agrícola plants many fields twice a year, so its planted area overstates its land. In Ukraine, rankings count land operated, almost all of it rented from millions of small owners.

BEFL itself warns that information on the world’s largest agricultural landholders is “often fragmented and chaotic”, and that the land banks of the very largest private companies are dominated by pasture and sometimes forest, with little arable land. State farm systems, sovereign funds and trusts publish little or nothing comparable. The table above is therefore a list of documented holdings, not a census. Treat the order as indicative and the scale as real.

Myth Check: Bill Gates Does Not Own America’s Farmland

A widely shared claim holds that Bill Gates is America’s biggest landowner, or that he is quietly buying up its food supply. The Land Report, which first exposed his farmland portfolio in early 2021, credits him with about 275,000 acres in all, the great majority of it farmland spread over 17 states. It calls him America’s largest private farmland owner, but he ranks only 44th among American landowners overall, and his holdings amount to about 0.03 per cent of the country’s roughly 880 million acres of farm and ranch land.

America’s largest private landowner is Stan Kroenke, owner of sports franchises including the Los Angeles Rams, who rose to first place in The Land Report’s 2026 list after buying almost 1 million acres of New Mexico ranchland from the heirs of the industrialist Henry Singleton in December 2025, taking him past 2.7 million acres. A second myth deserves correction too. The FAO finding that 1 per cent of farms operate 70 per cent of farmland is about farm operations, including leased land and vast arid ranches. It does not mean that 1 per cent of people own 70 per cent of the world’s land.

Farmland as an Asset Class

The reason investors want farmland is visible in the price. The US Department of Agriculture’s 2026 Land Values report put the average value of American cropland at a record $6,020 an acre, the first time it has closed above $6,000, with farm real estate averaging $4,500 an acre. The American Farm Bureau Federation calculates that farm real estate values are up nearly 44 per cent since 2020.

The rush for land has also crossed borders. The Land Matrix, an independent monitoring initiative, had recorded 1,865 international land deals by 2020 targeting about 33 million hectares for agriculture, of which about 30 million were concluded, an area comparable to Italy or the Philippines. Its researchers estimated that between 9 and 22 million hectares had yet to be put into production, and that in most host countries the deals would employ less than 0.5 per cent of the national workforce even if every deal became fully productive. Supporters of large investments argue that they bring capital, machinery and yields that small farms cannot reach. Critics reply that the jobs are few and the land, once leased for decades, rarely returns.

Water can matter as much as soil. In October 2023 Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, terminated a 640 acre state land lease held by Fondomonte Arizona, a subsidiary of the Saudi dairy company Almarai, and declined to renew three others in Butler Valley, where the company had pumped groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for livestock in Saudi Arabia. The company said it would appeal, but by March 2024 the governor’s office said it had stopped pumping in Butler Valley. It had bought nearly 10,000 acres of its own at Vicksburg, Arizona, in 2014.

The Foreign Buyer Question

Foreign ownership of farmland is one of the most politically charged land questions in the world, and the data show smaller foreign holdings than the debate often implies. Under a 1978 disclosure law, foreign investors held interests in 45.85 million acres of American agricultural land at the end of 2023, about 3.6 per cent of privately held agricultural land, according to US Department of Agriculture filings analysed by the American Farm Bureau Federation. Almost half of it was forest, and much of the recent growth came from European wind and solar companies on long leases. Investors linked to China held 277,336 acres, about 0.02 per cent.

Elsewhere, consolidation is domestic. BEFL’s Russian ranking has grown from 32 companies controlling 7.6 million hectares in 2014 to 81 companies with 19.9 million hectares in 2026; the top ten alone hold 7.8 million. In Ukraine, which opened its farmland market in 2021, the top 100 agricultural companies operate about 5.3 million hectares, nearly a quarter of the sown area, according to Latifundist and Forbes Ukraine, and more than 600,000 hectares of their land lies in territory occupied by Russia.

The Caribbean Turns to Land

For the Caribbean, the farmland question is about food. CARICOM heads of government set a goal of cutting the region’s food import bill, then more than $6 billion a year, by 25 per cent by 2025. In February 2025 they extended the deadline to 2030. Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali, the lead head of government on agriculture, said regional food production had risen by about 24 per cent between 2022 and late 2024. We could find no published final scorecard against the original 25 per cent target.

Guyana, with land to spare, has become the region’s farmland frontier. Its government opened roughly 61,000 hectares of savannah at Tacama, Wiruni and Ebini on the Berbice River for corn and soya, the raw material for poultry feed. A local consortium, Tacama Gold, had more than 7,500 acres under cultivation by October 2025 and capacity for about 15,000.

Jamaica remains a heavy food importer. STATIN figures cited by the US Commercial Service put food and beverage imports at about $1.3 billion in 2024, roughly 40 per cent of it from the United States, with about 60 per cent destined for hotels, restaurants and institutions.

Jamaica’s Missing Census

Jamaica’s most detailed picture of who farms its land is now 19 years old. The 2007 Census of Agriculture, conducted by STATIN, found 325,810 hectares in farms, down about 20 per cent from 1996. The number of farms rose by 22 per cent to 228,683 over the same period, driven by holdings under one hectare and by landless livestock farms, which almost doubled to 28,070. Average farm size fell to 1.4 hectares.

The census also measured what was not being farmed. About 80,560 hectares, a quarter of all farmland, was classed as ruinate or fallow. A third of individual holders were 55 or older. Clarendon held the largest share of farmland, about 14 per cent, and sugar cane covered more land than any other crop, about 58,000 hectares. We could find no published agricultural census since; the World Bank’s land use series still estimates agricultural land at about 38.5 per cent of Jamaica’s land area, and arable land at about 11 per cent.

How Jamaica’s Farmland Was Divided

The concentration is an inheritance. Plantation estates took the flat, fertile and irrigable land; freed people after 1838 built the peasantry on hillsides and marginal plots. Independent Jamaica tried repeatedly to redistribute. The Land Development and Utilization Act of 1966 let the state declare agricultural land idle and order it brought into production. Under Michael Manley’s Project Land Lease, between 1973 and 1980 the state placed nearly 30,000 hectares in the hands of about 36,000 farmers, most of them previously landless, on leases rather than freeholds, according to research by the geographer Tony Weis.

The results were mixed. Donovan Stanberry, a former permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, has written that much Land Lease land was never given the roads, drainage and irrigation that commercial farming needs. In 2015 the then agriculture minister, Derrick Kellier, said thousands of acres acquired in St Mary decades earlier for Pioneer Farms still lay idle, and announced plans to reclaim about 20,000 acres of government land for agro parks.

The Agro Park Bet

That model is now the state’s main instrument. The Agro Investment Corporation says it manages nine agro parks and ten production zones covering about 8,600 acres; its chief executive, Vivion Scully, told diaspora investors in 2026 that its portfolio had reached about 12,000 acres, with a goal of 20,000 within three to five years. The Parnassus Agro Park in Clarendon, opened in April 2025 on 776 acres of former cane land with £16.7 million in British grant funding, has been leased to 42 investors, and 23 former informal occupants received formal leases for 159.5 acres.

Agriculture Minister Floyd Green told Parliament in May 2026 that 120 acres were taken back from idle lessees in 2025 and a further 280 acres had been identified for repossession, a move he said would lift utilisation in the parks closer to 80 per cent, and that the government intends to build an agro park in every parish. The scale is modest by world standards: 8,600 acres is about 3,500 hectares, roughly 1 per cent of Jamaica’s 2007 farmland and about one four hundredth of Miratorg’s land bank. Supporters argue that Jamaica’s advantage was never size but irrigated, clustered production close to hotels and markets.

Melissa and the Smallholder

Hurricane Melissa showed how exposed that system is. Mr Green told Parliament in November 2025 that the storm caused about J$29.5 billion in farm sector losses, roughly US$185 million at current exchange rates, affecting more than 70,000 farmers and about 41,390 hectares, equal to around an eighth of the land in farms at the 2007 census. Vegetable damage covered 32,400 hectares, almost 70 per cent of the year’s yam crop was lost, and a quarter of the fishing fleet was damaged. The minister later said a World Bank assessment put agricultural damage at about US$300 million.

Employment in agriculture fell from 201,400 in October 2024 to 197,400 a year later, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica, though the sector still accounted for 14 per cent of employed Jamaicans and grew 2.9 per cent in real terms in 2025, about 7.7 per cent of the economy.

What This Means for Jamaica

For buyers and investors, farmland is its own market. Jamaica places no restriction on foreign ownership of land, as officials of the investment agency JAMPRO have stressed, which makes title, family land and lease status the real hurdles rather than nationality. Anyone buying agricultural land should confirm whether it sits inside a government lease scheme, whether it carries occupiers with a claim, and whether irrigation actually reaches it.

For policy, the global picture cuts both ways. Advocates of consolidation point to the yields and investment that scale brings. Defenders of smallholders point to the Land Matrix finding that large deals create few jobs, and to the FAO evidence that small farms produce about a third of the world’s food on an eighth of its farmland. Jamaica’s agro parks try to sit between the two, leasing state land in larger blocks while keeping places for small farmers, women and young people. Whether that works cannot be judged without data, and the island has not published a full count of its farms since 2007.

Land, Food and Power

Every country eventually discovers that farmland is not only a business. It is where food security, rural employment and political memory meet. Russia’s agroholdings, Australia’s cattle empires and America’s billionaire ranchers are the product of cheap land and deep capital. Jamaica’s hillside plots are the product of a different history, and of hurricanes that return every few years.

The world’s farmland is being gathered into fewer hands. Jamaica cannot match that scale, but it can decide who farms its land, on what terms, and whether anyone is keeping count.