Dive Brief:
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ real estate arm is paying $289 million to acquire tens of thousands of acres of farmland across eight states.
- Farmland Reserve, a nonprofit arm of the Mormon Church, is buying 46 farms from real estate investor Farmland Partners. The farms encompass 41,500 acres of land and include sites in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma and the Carolinas.
- Doug Rose, CEO of Farmland Reserve, said the company plans to lease “these productive farms to local farmers.”
Dive Insight:
The Mormon Church has for decades gobbled up farmland across the United States, quickly becoming a major landowner in areas like Florida and Nebraska.
The LDS Church owns approximately 1.7 million acres of land primarily used for agriculture, according to Landgate, a commercial real estate advisory service, making it one of the largest institutional landholders in the U.S.
It’s estimated the church owns $16 billion worth of property across the country, with around $2 billion for agriculture land, according to Landgate.
A definitive accounting of the church’s farmland holdings is difficult to determine, however. Religious organizations are not obligated to publicly report income or assets, which include real estate.
The Mormon Church recently embarked on a farm buying spree across Nebraska in 2018, and over the next five years, the church became the state’s top single buyer of land, according to Successful Farming. The church’s pace of purchases puts it on track to become the state’s largest landowner, surpassing CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner.
Farmland Reserve leases land to local farmers, primarily in the United States, according to its website. The nonprofit also leases land for solar and wind renewable energy.
In addition to its vast landholdings, LDS also runs a number of farms through the for-profit subsidiary AgReserves. The AgReserves network includes row crops farms, ranches, and tree crops orchards in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia.
AgReserves’ mission is to “invest in and operate agricultural assets to generate long-term value for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” according to its website.
Farming is also central to the Mormon Church’s robust private welfare system, which relies on a network of farms, ranches, dairies and food processing facilities to produce goods that can be redistributed to members in need.
Many of these welfare farms are run by volunteers, though some church members serve on these operations as missionaries. The welfare system produces hundreds of millions of pounds of food a year.