160,000 Farmers Gone Since 2017, Gates Keeps Buying

Between 2017 and 2024, America lost 160,000 farmers and ranchers, according to newly published USDA data.

Along with them went over 20 million acres of productive farmland, disappearing into the growing portfolios of billionaires and corporations—chief among them, Bill Gates, now the largest private farmland owner in the United States, with over 275,000 acres under his belt.

While small and midsize family farms were driven out—choked by debt, rising input costs, and corporate monopolies on everything from seeds to slaughterhouses—Gates and his peers were quietly buying up the scraps.

They weren’t planting food. They were parking wealth. This is a strategic asset transfer.

Look at the USDA’s own data.

The number of farms in the U.S. peaked around 1935, then plummeted. And despite occasional upticks, we’re now at the lowest number of farms in over a century—1.88 million in 2024. Meanwhile, average farm size has ballooned to 466 acres, a result of consolidation.

It Gets Worse

More telling is the drop in total land used for farming.

The U.S. is down to 876 million acres, shrinking steadily as development, corporate ownership, and speculative holding reduce the amount of land actually used for growing food.

That’s over 20 million acres lost since 2017 alone—land that once fed people, now hoarded or left idle.

And yet, USDA policies continue to favor massive agribusiness operations. Subsidies flow to the top. Small farmers are left to drown in red tape, bank loans, and supply chain bottlenecks. This is not an accident. It’s policy by design.

It ties into this:

The land is being stripped from the many and handed to the few. And it’s being done under the guise of efficiency and sustainability—buzzwords that conveniently mask a land grab decades in the making.

This isn’t just a farming crisis. It’s a food security issue.

A sovereignty issue, even.

A corporate colonization of the American heartland.

And it’s happening in plain sight.