The “financialization of farmland” (Fairbairn 2014) in the wake of the food crisis of 2007-2008 saw large-scale investors and absentee landowners looking to farmland in the United States as a promising investment. Land emerged as a popular commodity for investment among private equity funds, hedge funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors. Agricultural liberalization, thus, took on yet another layer of financial complexity, a complexity that has yet to be fully understood. The literature on the “global land grab” (Borras 2010) has yet to fully grapple with how investment happens, particularly when it comes to farmland in the United States and North America more broadly. Analyses of these processes in the U.S. (Gunnoe 2014) and Canada (Desmarais et al. 2017) are notable exceptions, but the relative dearth of contemporary scholarship examining institutional farmland ownership and farmland investment activity leaves many gaps in the existing literature on US land change, in large part because of the general lack of transparency of US land ownership data. Our paper will highlight our unique methodological contribution to addressing this problem.
This paper begins by presenting nascent empirical research gleaned from a detailed review of farmland tax parcel data in McDonough and Fulton Counties, Illinois, two highly productive agricultural counties. Our early work develops a method for overcoming the lack of transparency in data about US landownership and financing. We organize land ownership according to corporate structure (e.g., Limited Liability Companies, Limited Partnerships, Limited Liability Partnerships, Family Limited Partnerships, Trusts, and Corporations). One reason for the gap in research in the US lies in the fundamental difficulty of acquiring and distilling this data. To meet this challenge, our analysis then employs an ownership database to study public records on each of these legal entities. We also examine Comprehensive Business Reports and the Uniform Commercial Code filings of the business/investment entities to identify parent companies, major creditors, debtors, and individual owners. This enables us to explore connections to possible related companies. From these data, we seek to understand the often-multilayered legal structures that can obfuscate the absentee ownership of a given land parcel, giving us a clearer view of the extent to which certain entities are concentrating land holdings by acquiring multiple parcels within the same county. This paper presents on our methodology, reports preliminary findings about major landowners and their financing structures, and offers some preliminary reflections on possible connections between farmland financialization and industrial hog farming in the US.
