Major changes to federal foreign ownership reporting loom
Aug. 11, 2026
By Mary Hightower
University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
Fast Facts
- Landscape of states' foreign ownership laws saw major changes from 2022-2026
- Proposal would change USDA regulatory authority over AFIDA
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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A federal report shows Arkansas had the nation’s second-highest number of farm acres divested from foreign ownership amid a trend in which the number of states allowing to foreign ownership of farmland was halved.
Harrison Pittman, director of the National Agricultural Law Center, discussed the evolution in scope and enforcement authority of state laws on foreign ownership, as well as previewing major changes at the federal level during a July webinar, discussing its evolution from America’s colonial period through the current year. The event was part of a series of monthly NALC webinars covering developments in agricultural, food and environmental law.
State stats
In 2022, the majority of states — 36 — either expressly allowed "foreign ownership as it relates to privately held agricultural land,” or were silent on the issue, Pittman said.
Fourteen states — Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin — had some kind of prohibition or restriction on foreign ownership of farmland, he said.
In July 2026, the map looks much different. States where there are no restrictions or where the law was friendly to foreign ownership are half of the 2022 total at 18. They are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
According to the 2024 Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act Report, the latest available, 46 million acres, or 3.6 percent, of all privately held U.S. agricultural land has foreign ownership.
Among states, Texas has the most acres in foreign ownership, 5.9 million. Maine is next at 3.5 million and Colorado is third at 2.4 million. By percentages, Maine has the most with 21.3 percent of its land in foreign ownership. Hawaii is next at 17.1 percent, with Michigan third at 8.8 percent.
The largest increases in foreign ownership in 2024 were New Mexico, at 235,026 acres, Texas, at 231,346 acres, and Oklahoma, at 196,868 acres.
In Arkansas, nearly 1.5 million acres, or 5.6 percent of its farmland, are foreign owned. Nationally, Arkansas had the second largest decrease in foreign ownership at 64,331 acres. The largest decrease was in North Carolina, with 181,066 acres coming out of foreign ownership.
Backdrop
The issue of foreign ownership “really predates our being a country,” Pittman said. “You had the British Crown wanting to colonize, and you had others wanting to not be colonized.”
A century later, laws barring Chinese ownership of land popped up but “those laws later were threatened to be declared unconstitutional and they fell off the books,” he said.
“We had another little spike in the 1970s,” Pittman said. At the time, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, began embargoing oil deliveries to the United States. “A lot of that spike related to foreign affairs and national security.”
The current surge of ownership restrictions has many triggers, but “a big one was of the Chinese investor that purchased a lot of land near an Air Force Base in Texas,” Pittman said. “At the time it was really designed and thought of to be a large wind energy project.
“Today we're really talking about foreign adversaries almost every time, if not every time,” he said.
Defining friend and foe
Farmland ownership restrictions vary from state to state. In some cases, the list of adversaries is defined by ITAR, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which includes the People’s Republic of China, Iran, North Korea and the Russian Federation.
The federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, also has a hand in determining ownership concerns.
CFIUS “can review certain transactions for national security concerns,” Pittman said. If the committee finds “a national security concern they find ways to mitigate that as part of the transaction in order for that transaction to go through.”
He said the committee “can even recommend to the president of the United States to not block or prohibit the transaction.”
Some states, such as Arkansas and West Virginia, specifically bar ag land ownership by prohibited foreign party-controlled business.
“It’s defined as a business in which 50 percent or more is owned or operated by what is known as a prohibited foreign party and that includes Chinese government and citizens and other nations that are deemed hostile to U.S. interest by state officials,” Pittman said.
There are “a handful of states where the state has delegated itself some authority in defining who's a friend and who isn't,” he said. “That raises an interesting dialogue on foreign affairs and constitutional powers.”
In October 2023, Arkansas became the first state to enforce a law on foreign ownership. Attorney General Tim Griffin ordered the China National Chemical Company as a “prohibited foreign-party-controlled business” to divest 160 acres it owned in Arkansas.
In 2025, Arizona, which already had a law barring those from adversarial nations from owning agricultural land, amended its laws to include all real property, Pittman said.
Arizona also “gave enforcement authority to its attorney general,” Pittman said.
“There were states that didn’t address enforcement and came back to clear up that up, often with the attorney general having authority to report to the appropriate state or federal law enforcement, to CFIUS, which can result in divestiture — selling a property,” he said.
According to the 2024 AFIDA report, Canadian interests hold the largest portion of U.S. agricultural land at 34 percent, followed by the Netherlands at 10 percent. The United Kingdom and Italy are tied at 6 percent, followed by Germany at 1 percent. China’s 247,659 acres comprises less than 1 percent of foreign owned farmland.
Expanding beyond farm land
Pittman also said some states are expanding the scope of their foreign ownership restrictions.
“You did see, in general, expansion to focus on natural resources — so think water rights, minerals and the like — and targeting land adjacent to or within a specific range of critical infrastructure or military installation,” he said.
These common threads emerged “despite the lack of uniformity among these laws,“ he said.
Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act
Pittman said “a significant, landmark change” was looming for the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, or AFIDA. The law enacted in 1978 requires foreign persons and entities to report land transactions, holdings, and transfers of U.S. agricultural land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Filings must be submitted within 90 days of an acquisition or transfer.
The changes are linked to the Consolidated Appropriation Act passed in 2023, which Pittman said was the first substantial amendment to AFIDA since its inception.
The act gave USDA three years to:
- Establish an electronic filing system for AFIDA reports, which was launched in January 2026.
- Set up an internet database that contains “disaggregated data” from each disclosure for privacy.
In January 2024, at the behest of Congress, the Government Accounting Office issued a report titled “Foreign Investments in U.S. Agricultural Land: Enhancing Efforts to Collect, Track and Share Key Information Could Better Identify National Security Risks.” The report made six recommendations, including that more timely and accurate AFIDA information be provided to CFIUS member agencies, including the Treasury Department and War Department.
The following year, the National Farm Security Action Plan was issued, meant to “fully integrate agriculture into the broader national security enterprise.”
In its introduction, the National Farm Security Action Plan states that “the food and agriculture sector is designated as critical infrastructure. National Security Memorandum NSM-16 and NSM-22 make it national policy to defend food and agriculture systems against terror attacks, major disasters, and other emergencies.”
Among the plan’s priorities is for USDA to “aggressively implement reforms to the AFIDA process.”
In April 2026, a final administrative rule was issued to transfer authority for AFIDA from the Farm Service Agency to USDA’s assistant secretary for administration.
In June, USDA published a proposed AFIDA overhaul that “delegates regulatory authority to the Office of Homeland Security within USDA,” Pittman said. “We don't know what all is going to be included."
However, given the sweep and the comprehensiveness of the proposal, it’s likely to include several definition modifications — “very importantly, the definition of agricultural land,” he said.
A recording of the presentation is available online.
About the National Agricultural Law Center
Created by Congress in 1987, the National Agricultural Law Center serves as the nation’s leading source of agricultural and food law research and information. The NALC works with producers, agribusinesses, state and federal policymakers, lenders, Congressional staffers, attorneys, land grant universities, students, and many others to provide objective, nonpartisan agricultural and food law research and information to the nation’s agricultural community.
The NALC is a unit of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and works in close partnership with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, National Agricultural Library.
To learn more about ag and food research in Arkansas, visit aaes.uada.edu. Follow the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station on LinkedIn and sign up for our monthly newsletter, the Arkansas Agricultural Research Report. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit uada.edu. To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit uaex.uada.edu.
About the Division of Agriculture
The University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture,
communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices.
Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service,
the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s
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Media Contact:
Phillip Powell
National Agricultural Law Center
ppowell1@uark.edu