Will Bill Gates’s green tech initiatives ever intersect with his growing agricultural empire? Who knows. Similar to private equity firms destabilizing the housing market, millionaires and billionaires investing in farmland are also creating their own set of issues, as they are now pricing out young farmers looking to buy land. Instead, he mostly acts like a landlord and allows professional farmers to keep doing their thing-even if those practices are ruinous to the environment. The financial crisis later in that same decade prompted an explosion of investments into farmland when monetary safe havens became scarce.Īlthough Gates owns these farms, he isn’t changing their practices. However, this practice of buying up agricultural land predates Bill Gates and has been a popular investment for the super-rich since at least the early 2000s. continues to shrink from climate-related pressures. According to Mother Jones, the average price of farmland increased six times from 1940 to 2015, and the trend is likely to continue as the amount of arable land in the U.S. Starting in 2013, Gates began investing his billions (through the firm Cascade Investment) in agriculture because of its steady increase in value and low volatility. It is not connected to climate.” That’s because the old adage goes: “Buy land-they aren’t making it anymore.” (Which volcanologists know isn’t exactly true, but you get the idea). Some experts have pointed to Gates’s well-known sustainability and green tech initiatives as a possible reason, but during an earlier Reddit AMA in 2021, Gates said, “my investment group chose to do this. So why does Bill Gates, and other billionaires like him, keep buying up so much farmland? farmland, it’s still a little more than one-third of the state of Rhode Island, a surprising amount for one person and enough to make Gates the largest landowner in the U.S. farmland, or about 270,000 acres spread across 18 different states. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) last week, Gates once again fielded a question pertaining to his AG holdings and stated that he actually only owns 1/4000 of all U.S. agriculture, with rumors that the former Microsoft CEO owns upward of 80 percent of farmland in the United States.Īmazing, if true-but it’s extremely not. One of the more colorful theories pertains to Gates’s strange interest in U.S. The billionaire can’t seem to do anythin g without drawing the conspiratorial ire of online netizens. Stats show agriculture is a pretty good investment for billionaires.īill Gates and conspiracy theories go together like peanut butter and jelly.That makes him the largest landowner in the U.S.Bill Gates owns a ton of farmland in the United States-as in, about 270,000 acres.
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