By Destiny Herbers, Flatwater Free Press
A glance at federal records shows the series of Nebraska farms listed as foreign-owned, though there’s no country attached and no hint that these farms with unassuming names might be related.
Willowdale Farms, Merrick County Farms, Dove Haven Ranch, Champion Valley Farm, Schroder Family Farms and many more are concentrated in northeast Nebraska but spread to the southeast corner and west nearly to Wyoming.
In Nebraska’s business records, they have one similarity: Each farm’s office address leads to a single-story brick building in the St. Louis suburbs, an office park housing a dentist, lawyers and, until recently, a farmland investment startup called AgCoA.
For years, AgCoA was owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, a government-owned group managing the retirement funds of 21 million Canadians.
But in 2017, the Canadian board decided to offload a half-billion dollar chunk of its American farmland portfolio — including all 22,830 acres of its Nebraska land.
The buyer of those unassuming-sounding Nebraska farms wasn’t publicly listed. Until now, the financial details of the transaction and the gargantuan loan he’s taken out against it have remained publicly unknown.
The buyer’s name: Bill Gates.
Tangled web of Gates
The billionaire who co-founded Microsoft has, in the past six years, spent more than $113 million buying Nebraska farmland.
The Flatwater Free Press analyzed five years of land sales data, between 2018 and 2022, originally gathered by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications data journalism class.
If that data had included the year 2017 — when Mt. Edna Farms, the Gates-owned company that made that massive purchase from the Canadian pension board — then Gates would have been the top buyer of Nebraska ag land by money spent. Since 2017, he has spent more than double the second-place buyer.
Gates’ farmland is held by more than 20 shell companies spread across the country.
Some lead back to a P.O. Box in Kirkland, Washington, the city where Cascade Asset Management, which manages all Gates’ investments, is headquartered.
Others are linked to Lenexa, Kansas and Monterey, Louisiana, population 371, where reporters have previously traced Gates’ operations.
These limited liability companies, buried under layers of business names, overlapping employees and addresses in at least three states, form a network more tangled and opaque than the one created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is buying a giant amount of Nebraska ranch land.
Because it’s hidden, Nebraskans living and farming in communities where Gates is among the largest landowners are often unaware that one of the world’s richest men owns the cornfield down the road.
Gates’ land ownership has been the source of much rumor, and some concern, in Nebraska, partly because of his connections to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which runs programs addressing issues of global public health, sustainability and climate change.
If Gates’ land was given to a nonprofit — potentially making it exempt from property taxes — it would “decimate” the counties involved, state Sen. Tom Brewer, a Republican whose district covers 11 rural counties in central and northern Nebraska, said in an email.
Three days before Christmas 2021, Mt. Edna Farms filed paperwork with Dawson County, clearing the path to use a part of Gates’ land as collateral. Gates’ LLC then took out two loans against his Nebraska farmland.
The total of those loans: $700 million.
The obvious question: Why is Gates, who Forbes deemed the world’s richest man 18 different times between 1995 and 2017, using Nebraska farmland to take out a $700 million loan?
1 comment:
This demon plans to profit from the misery of others. China and Gates are buying farmland for the purpose of profit. Ecocide is a push coming from the satanic new world order. Starvation is on the table as part of the depopulation agenda. What better way is there than own the land and not plant or plant genetically engineered food that could have a bio weapon imbedded. We will never know as censorship is coming fast and furious with extreme penalties.
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