Why does Bill Gates own a quarter of a million acres of US farmland and buying more?

[Anti Federalist]

The real reason why Bill Gates is now the US’ biggest farmland owner

https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/why-bi...armland-owner/

Late last year, Eric O’Keefe was researching a mysterious recent purchase of 14,500 acres of prime Washington state farmland. His magazine, The Land Report, tracks major land transactions and produces an annual list of the 100 biggest US landowners.

Sales of more than a thousand acres are “blue-moon events,” O’Keefe noted, so this one stood out. And Eastern Washington has some of the richest, most expensive farmland in the country. But the purchaser of record was a small, obscure company in Louisiana.

“That immediately set off alarm bells,” O’Keefe says.

He assigned his research team to dig a little deeper. Soon they came back with the answer: The Louisiana company was acting on behalf of Cascade Investment LLC, the secretive investment firm that manages most of the huge fortune belonging to Bill Gates.

O’Keefe knew Gates had been acquiring farmland for years, mostly through various Cascade subsidiaries. The mogul’s holdings include large tracts in Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, California, and about a dozen other states. With the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio, O’Keefe calculated, Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.

(Much more at link...too much to copypasta. But I don't buy what the article is selling: that Gates is just a harmless billionaire investor.)

[donnay]

The man is far from harmless--he has a God-complex. Gates is trying to corner the farmers markets with his gut destroying GMO's.

[Anti Globalist]

Because he wants to control the food supply.

[Brian4Liberty]

The first and most obvious reason is in the article:

“Farmland has had a remarkably consistent ability to hedge against inflation,” Sherrick says.

And it tends to be “negatively correlated” against other investments, he adds: If the stock market is going down, the return on farmland is likely to be going up.

But there is usually more than one reason behind such things. In the case of Gates, control of that farmland would be another motivation.

[Pauls' Revere]

Plants can send email to warn us of climate change.

https://theprint.in/science/plants-t...ionics/598255/

Emerging field of plant nanobionics uses sensors and nanotechnology embedded in plants to exploit their natural processes for data collection and interpretation.

[Occam's Banana]

Why does Bill Gates own a quarter of a million acres of US farmland and buying more?

Hmmmmmm ...

For those of us playing "Present Day America vis-à-vis the Late Roman Republic" bingo, does this qualify as marking off the square for latifundia?

(If so, then the square for Lex Agraria might also be filled soon. There have already been signs of this ...)

[parocks]

Watch James Bond movies and see what the villains do in those movies. Maybe something like that.

[Anti Globalist]

Watch James Bond movies and see what the villains do in those movies. Maybe something like that.

Gates really is a James Bond villain.

[donnay]

Gates really is a James Bond villain.

He's a real life villain.