The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will pay $289 million in cash for a massive addition to its expansive empire of farmlands, further bolstering the faith’s position among the largest U.S. agricultural landowners.
The purchase through subsidiary Farmland Reserve, set to close Wednesday, will fold into its vast real estate portfolio 46 farms covering a total of 41,554 acres in Arkansas, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, as well as in Florida and Nebraska, where the Utah-based church already has large landholdings with rich farming operations.
The faith’s nonprofit farm investment company has made a spate of similarly large purchases since 2018, solidifying it as a key player in the U.S. farm sector and a leading landowner in several states — part of overall holdings of food-producing farms and ranches worldwide amounting to about 2.5 million acres or more.
The seller in this deal, a Denver-based real estate investment trust named Farmland Partners Inc., says in a statement it would use cash from offloading the collection of farms — about a fifth of the acres it owns and manages — to pay down debt, make additional acquisitions, and deliver value to its stockholders.
Luca Fabbri, its president and CEO, calls Farmland Reserve “a high-quality institutional investor” and says the firm “is highly respected in the farmland community as a best-in-class owner that manages farms expertly and deals honestly and ethically with its farmer tenants.”
Doug Rose, CEO of Farmland Reserve, in the same statement, lauds the acres it is buying across the central and southern U.S. as a “unique portfolio of high-quality farmland” and says it is grateful for the chance to buy the tracts.
“We’re also gratified they saw us as the right buyer for these properties and the farmer tenant relationships that come with them,” Rose says. “As an investor with a long-term vision, we look forward to leasing these productive farms to local farmers for many years to come.”
Contours of the deal were announced Oct. 2 by Farmland Partners, a publicly traded company, and reported in several farm industry publications.
Farmlands held and run through nonprofit Farmland Reserve and the church’s for-profit AgReserves, with operations across the Americas, Europe and Australia, are key components of the faith’s overall investment portfolio and part of food production vital to its private welfare systems for a global membership of 17.2 million, along with its far-reaching charitable outreach.
In response to a Salt Lake Tribune inquiry, Rose offered an additional comment, relayed through a church spokesperson:
“By investing and operating wisely,” Rose said in the statement, “the returns earned by Farmland Reserve and AgReserves are available to support the mission of the church and its religious, humanitarian, educational, and charitable good works.”
Investing and feeding the hungry
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City ranks among the church's most valuable real estate holdings.
The farms that Farmland Reserve is buying reportedly produce a variety of crops depending on their location, climate, soil type and water availability, as well as crop rotations and other decisions made by the farmers leasing the land. Among their harvests are corn, soybeans, cotton, peas, rice and peanuts.
When it closes, the purchase from Farmland Partners will add more than 41,000 acres of what are primarily row crops — along with their water rights and support facilities — to roughly 2.5 million acres of identifiable commercial farms and ranches owned by the church — with nearly 85% of those located across North America.
That’s according to one reliable tally. The church is not legally obligated to publicly report its overall landholdings, which property records and public databases indicate are held through hundreds of companies internationally.
Research by the website Widow’s Mite Report indicates that with agricultural lands, temples, chapels and other ecclesiastical buildings, property held through Brigham Young University and extensive commercial real estate holdings, the church’s land portfolio could top $121 billion.
Public records reveal that huge chunks of ranch lands, farms, timber reserves, nut groves, orchards and plots of staple crops like potatoes and corn, located in pockets across the American heartland, are also some of the church’s most valuable real estate holdings.
Its commercial development at City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City tops that list at about $2 billion. But close behind — and all hovering around $1 billion in value — are its recently acquired Rex Ranch in Nebraska; Deseret Ranches and Farms and a patch of timberlands in Florida; Deseret Land and Livestock Ranch, near the northern Utah-Idaho border; and a reserve of roughly 250,000 acres of ranches and farms in Brazil.
(Tribune file photo) A pronghorn is seen at the Deseret Land and Livestock Ranch in Rich County.
A separate tally of large landowners by Landgate, a commercial real estate listing and data service, labels the church an “Agriculture Titan.”
The service ranks the faith as having the fifth largest landholdings in the U.S., behind timber and forest-product giants Weyerhaeuser, Rayonier and Sierra Pacific Industries and The Nature Conservancy. The latter is focused on ecological preservation.
Farms, ranches bought ‘for long-term value’
Announcement of the Farmland Partners purchase comes as the church is in the midst of a worldwide push to build more temples and as it faces increased scrutiny over its wealth and finances. At the same time, the church has launched a sizable growth spurt for its farm holdings, beginning well before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Accord to its website, AgReserves invests in and operates farms and ranches “to generate long-term value” for the church. “We grow food that helps feed the world,” the site says, “and we contribute in the communities where we live and work.”
Its ranch spreads over central Florida’s Osceola, Orange and Brevard counties have already made it that state’s top landowner, with up to 2% of total landmass of the Sunshine State. This latest purchase will boost that standing, though the Farmland Partners’ news release does not specify how much of the land it is selling is located there.
Farmland Reserve is seeking to annex more than 52,000 of its 300,000 acres of ranch land outside of Orlando into that resort city in a move that would expand the Florida metropolis’ footprint by roughly 60%.
(John Raoux | AP) Cowboys herd cattle from one pasture to another at Deseret Ranches in Florida in 2015.
Activists, including a grassroots group called Save Orange County, are fighting the move, with worries that developing the vast swath under looser city rules could strain taxpayers, damage the environment and threaten water supplies, reports WKMG, an Orlando TV station.
Even so, the church’s proposal has cleared an initial hurdle with City Council members.
Nebraska media outlets have reported that since 2018, Farmland Reserve has been on a buying spree in rural Garden County and four neighboring counties that made it that state’s top land purchaser at one point. Its expansion in the Cornhusker State, bolstered by this deal, has pushed its holdings of agriculturally zoned land above 370,000 acres, also among that state’s largest property holdings.
The trend drew pushback from some Nebraska farmers, with complaints the church purchases were elevating land prices and squeezing out local growers.
Farmland Reserve beat out an investment company linked to Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 2021 with a $209 million bid to buy an extensive farm operation known as Easterday Farm in southeastern Washington out of bankruptcy. That deal included ranch lands and nearly 22,500 acres of potatoes, onions, corn and wheat fields along the Columbia Basin.
