By Mary Hightower
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
Fast Facts
- Landscape of states’ foreign ownership laws saw major changes from 2022-2026
- Proposal would change USDA regulatory authority over AFIDA
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A federal report shows Arkansas had the nation’s second-highest number of farm acres divested from foreign ownership amid a trend in which the number of states allowing to foreign ownership of farmland was halved.
Harrison Pittman, director of the National Agricultural Law Center, discussed the evolution in scope and enforcement authority of state laws on foreign ownership, as well as previewing major changes at the federal level during a July webinar, discussing its evolution from America’s colonial period through the current year. The event was part of a series of monthly NALC webinars covering developments in agricultural, food and environmental law.
NALC Director Harrison Pittman noted significant changes in foreign ownership laws between 2022 and 2026. (UADA image)
State stats
In 2022, the majority of states — 36 — either expressly allowed “foreign ownership as it relates to privately held agricultural land,” or were silent on the issue, Pittman said.
Fourteen states — Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin — had some kind of prohibition or restriction on foreign ownership of farmland, he said.
In July 2026, the map looks much different. States where there are no restrictions or where the law was friendly to foreign ownership are half of the 2022 total at 18. They are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
According to the 2024 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act Report, the latest available, 46 million acres, or 3.6 percent, of all privately held U.S. agricultural land has foreign ownership.
Among states, Texas has the most acres in foreign ownership, 5.9 million. Maine is next at 3.5 million and Colorado is third at 2.4 million. By percentages, Maine has the most with 21.3 percent of its land in foreign ownership. Hawaii is next at 17.1 percent, with Michigan third at 8.8 percent.
The largest increases in foreign ownership in 2024 were New Mexico, at 235,026 acres, Texas, at 231,346 acres, and Oklahoma, at 196,868 acres.
In Arkansas, nearly 1.5 million acres, or 5.6 percent of its farmland, are foreign owned. Nationally, Arkansas had the second largest decrease in foreign ownership at 64,331 acres. The largest decrease was in North Carolina, with 181,066 acres coming out of foreign ownership.
Backdrop
The issue of foreign ownership “really predates our being a country,” Pittman said. “You had the British Crown wanting to colonize, and you had others wanting to not be colonized.”
A century later, laws barring Chinese ownership of land popped up but “those laws later were threatened to be declared unconstitutional and they fell off the books,” he said.
“We had another little spike in the 1970s,” Pittman said. At the time, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, began embargoing oil deliveries to the United States. “A lot of that spike related to foreign affairs and national security.”
The current surge of ownership restrictions has many triggers, but “a big one was of the Chinese investor that purchased a lot of land near an Air Force Base in Texas,” Pittman said. “At the time it was really designed and thought of to be a large wind energy project.
“Today we’re really talking about foreign adversaries almost every time, if not every time,” he said.
To read the full news release, click here.