Word: farms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Iowa has been monitoring ownership of its 33 million acres of farm land for three years and has discovered that there are all of 27 nonresident alien owners, most of them West Germans; together, they have less than 9,000 acres...
...even $2,000 an acre for land that, even with inflation, should not cost more than $800." Iowa Congressman Tom Harkin warns that the oil-producing nations, which sold the U.S. $45 billion worth of petroleum last year, "could buy the whole state of Iowa, every acre of farm producing land, with just 394 days of oil production...
...wanting to put all their cash into one breadbasket seems remote, and the scare stories are based on phony evidence or plain prejudice. When asked to back up his claim that "thousands and thousands of acres are being bought up," California State Assemblyman John Thurman cited one "foreign" farm in California; in fact, it is owned by an American of Iranian descent. Under questioning, Tom Harkin admitted that foreign land buying "has not yet affected Iowa...
...affected much of the rest of the U.S. Last June the GAO surveyed 25 counties in five states (California, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma) and discovered that foreigners own no more than three-tenths of 1% of the farm land. The Department of Agriculture figures that, of 1 billion acres of privately owned farm land, only 3 million to 5 million acres are in foreign hands...
Could the foreigners be buying elsewhere and skipping these rich farm states? Not likely. Says Garrett Cole, vice president of Oppenheimer Industries, a Kansas City firm that deals in agricultural land: "In a single year, no more than 3% of all farm land comes up for sale, and I'd be surprised if more than 2% [of that] is bought by foreigners...