No one seems to love the great outdoors quite like billionaires do. America's wealthiest are snapping up huge swathes of farmland, and while some are using the land for elaborate hobbies, agriculture advocates worry that the broader trend of the rich purchasing tillage is putting the livelihoods of actual farmers at risk.

Billionaires such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian have effectively dubbed themselves amateur yeomen, putting the ultrarich's hobby of tending to the land in the spotlight. In an episode of the Idea Generation podcast published last month, Zuckerberg said he is working to create the perfect steak by raising wagyu and angus cattle on his ranch on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Called Ko'olau Ranch, the $300 million property has expanded to about 4,000 acres after he first bought land on the island in 2014.

"I'm very into the genetics of the cattle," Zuckerberg said.

Investor and Reddit cofounder Ohanian, meanwhile, offered a tour of his family farm in Jupiter, Florida, in a LinkedIn post on Thursday, showing off banana shoots, an herb garden, and an apiary. He has owned the farm for six years.

But these ventures are tiny compared to the ranchlands, timberlands, and cropfields many one-percenters are nabbing. According to the 2025 Land Report 100, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates owns 275,000 acres of land, the 44th most of any American landowner. Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has 462,000 acres, and Stan Kroenke, Los Angeles Rams owner and husband to Walmart heiress Ann Walton Kroenke, owns 2.7 million acres. Neither Zuckerberg nor Ohanian cracks the top 100 landowners.

Even at those numbers, billionaire holdings are a sliver of the roughly 880 million acres of land in American farms, and family operations still account for about 97% of all U.S. farms, according to the USDA.

In fact, farmland has become a $4.3 trillion asset class as it grows in popularity, according to Steve Bruere, president of agricultural real estate firm Peoples Company. For many of the ultrawealthy, farmland has become a way to hedge against inflation and the volatility of other, more traditional assets: Last year, the value of U.S. farms was an average of about $4,350 per acre, a 4.3% year-over-year increase, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

But as demand goes higher, the rising cost of farmland could also spell trouble for actual farmers.

"It makes it much harder for farmers to compete, especially beginning farmers who are maybe trying to acquire their first farm, or even an existing farmer who might want to grow and expand," Erin Foster West, policy campaigns director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told Fortune earlier this year.

How did farmland become a popular asset among the wealthy?

About 20 years ago, following the 2008 financial crisis, investors went in search of alternative safe-haven assets, finding greener pastures for traditional investments on, well, greener pastures. The demand for farmland mirrored the real-estate boom of the 1970s, with investors working to hedge against inflation with a physical asset, much like gold. The buyer pool has since widened well beyond the wealthy: publicly traded farmland real estate investment trusts and private farmland funds now let pension funds and individual investors own pieces of cropland they may never visit.

Land is a finite resource and positively correlated with inflation, continuing to appreciate as costs go up. Because of the close relationship between land use and food scarcity, there is also a theory that farmland will only become more precious as the population grows.

"If you believe you want diversification, and you also believe we're going to have underlying inflation—which is what a lot of people want right now—then farmland is a great option for them," Bruere told Fortune. "Getting your hands on some farmland where the number of arable acres in the world declines every year, that's why a lot of people like it."

That is on top of the growing demand for land from AI hyperscalers, who are looking for large swaths of earth, including farms.

For many of the ultrarich, there is also a less strategic benefit to owning the land, as exhibited by Zuckerberg and Ohanian: their own enjoyment.

"A lot of people started to appreciate the non-financial benefits of farmland," Bruere said. "You can hike it, you can walk on it, you can fish it, you can hunt it, you can grow food on it. That trend really emerged coming out of the Covid area, where people were stuck in their homes and apartments and started looking for alternative investments."

What does this emerging asset class mean for American farmers?

For others, being a major landowner can mean being a landlord. Nearly 40% of U.S. farmland is now leased to farmers and operators, according to the USDA. Much of that rented ground is owned by non-operating landlords—people who own farmland but don't farm it—a category that includes retired farmers and heirs as well as investors.

Renting isn't necessarily a bad thing for farmers, particularly those just starting out, Foster West said. Rent for farmers is increasing more slowly than land prices, with average rent for U.S. cropland ticking up just 0.6% annually, per the USDA Land Values survey.

However, renting also means farmers don't have full control over their land, making it challenging to make long-term investments to improve soil quality or to build wash-and-pack stations for vegetables, which could take years to pay off.

The problem, according to Foster West, is when farmers are renting because they have been outbid on purchasable land and have no choice but to be tenants. It means farmers aren't able to use their land to get loans for their operations, borrow for their kids' college expenses, or leverage it for their own retirement.

The stakes are sharpened by demographics: the average American farmer is roughly 58 years old, according to the USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture, and agriculture groups expect a large share of the nation's farmland to change hands over the coming decades—a transition that will help shape who owns, and who works, that land.

"The control over that land, having that asset in your possession, really can make a difference for a farmer to be successful," she said.

Source: Fortune