Seattle’s technology billionaires are many things: innovators, visionaries, philanthropists and some less polite descriptors, depending on whom you ask. But thanks to some scrupulous digging by industry journal The Land Report, which tracks land ownership across the country, we now know that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has another feather in his multi hyphenated career cap: America’s Top Private Owner of Farmland.
Gates has spent years quietly diversifying his $129 billion fortune through asset manager Cascade Investments to include at least 224,000 acres of U.S. farmland since at least 2014, when the acreage was rapidly increasing in value. But a few weeks ago, The Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe revealed Gates’ field-topping stake in cropland — as well as that he’s now the 49th largest private owner of land in the country, period.
O’Keefe unearthed this information after tracking the unnamed buyer of a conspicuously expensive single transfer of Washington acreage in 2018. The Tri-City Herald’s Wendy Culverwell reported that a farm partnership “with no clear interest in Washington” was behind the $171 million purchase of 14,500 acres in the Horse Heaven Hills area of southwest Benton County. The land is occupied by 100 Circle Farms, which produces potatoes for McDonald’s french fries.
“More often than not, farmland sales involve hundreds of acres,” O’Keefe wrote in his piece. “Thousand-acre transactions […] are blue-moon events. Tens of thousands of acres? Only sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors can [strike] a check for tracts in that league, which is exactly what occurred on the sell side of the 100 Circles transaction.”