Who owns farms in america

Louis area. According to the St. Remember that metal-sided building down near the Bayou Teche? Turns out that very same property had caught my eye way back when The Land Report was preparing to launch in Does the name Bernie Ebbers ring a bell?

After losing his appeal in , Ebbers spent most of the rest of his life in a federal prison before being granted compassionate release by a federal judge earlier this year. He died on February 2 surrounded by his family.

Ebbers was many things — a dreamer, a liar, a swindler — and he loved land. He also owned a 26,acre Louisiana farm. It, too, was sold, on September 25, , the day before Ebbers began serving his sentence at the Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution. It was his last deal as a free man. When Ebbers owned this Louisiana farm, it was known as Angelina Plantation. And its headquarters was in — you guessed it — Monterey, Louisiana. That was the missing piece of the puzzle I had been searching for as I read the Tri-City Herald story.

It took a dozen years, but the ownership of that Louisiana farmland went from Bernie Ebbers to Bill Gates with a couple of stops in between. I readily admit forgetting where and when I first caught wind of it, but the moment I read that Tri-City Herald story, I knew the ending definitely needed a rewrite.

Steve Everett would be proud. This article was updated to properly credit Wendy Culverwell as the reporter who first broke the story of the Horse Heaven Hills transaction in the Tri-City Herald. In general, farm households are neither low-income nor low-wealth. Overall, we see that median household income increases along with farm sales.

Many family farm households combine farm and off-farm work to generate income and receive other benefits from an off-farm job. Off-farm occupation farms are those where the principal operator reports doing something other than farming as their main occupation.

Farming is still overwhelmingly comprised of family businesses. While most U. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get far less praise for it. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation! The United States is defined by the excesses of its ruling class.

But why do a handful of people own so much land? Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land — who owns it, who works it and who cares for it — reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, and also the world. Wealth accumulation always goes hand-in-hand with exploitation and dispossession. In this country, enslaved Black labor first built US wealth atop stolen Native land.

Ariel Shapiro Former Staff. Follow me on Twitter. Send me a secure tip. Ariel Shapiro.