Bill Gates, Microsoft’s billionaire and co-founder, owns 242,000 acres of farmland, making him the largest farmland owner in America. Your investment in agriculture may be linked to your investments in agricultural enterprises for climate change and in Impossible Foods, a company that develops vegetable substitutes for meat products.
Gates’ 242,000 acres of farmland includes at least 100,000 acres of farmland in California, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana and 15 other states, according to a 2014 report Wall Street Journal Michael Larson’s profile. Larson, who manages Gates’ personal portfolio and the stakes of the philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, helped coordinate land purchases as a way to diversify the couple’s lucrative investments away from technology.
In 2017, Gates purchased $ 520 million in US farmland owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board through the 2013 acquisition of Agricultural Company of America, a real estate investment fund launched by Duquesne Capital Management and Goldman Sachs in 2007, from a deal with Land Report.
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Gates now owns farms in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Its five largest farms are 69,071 acres in Louisiana, 47,927 acres in Arkansas, 25,750 acres in Arizona, 20,588 acres in Nebraska and 14,828 acres in Florida.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s initiatives include Gates Ag One, which focuses on research to help “small farmers adapt to climate change and make food production in low and middle income countries more productive, resilient and sustainable. “. The initiative would also seek to spread its sustainable farming methods over as much planted area as possible.
Gates has also invested millions in Impossible Foods, a company whose plant-based meat products are made from soy and potato protein, but look and taste like sausage and ground beef. The products also contain amounts of iron and protein comparable to their meat counterparts, but have no cholesterol and no gluten.
The products are now being sold at Trader Joe’s and other grocery stores, 2,100 Walmarts in the United States and 5,000 locations, including restaurants and fast-food chains like Little Caesar’s pizza, White Castle burgers and Burger King.
In 2019, Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, said the company was working on a vegetable-based steak, telling food technology website The Spoon: “If we can make an incredibly delicious world-class steak … that it will be very disturbing, not just for the meat industry, but for other sectors of the meat industry. “
Considering that the industrial beef industry is a $ 3 trillion business and the impacts that climate change will have on agriculture worldwide, Gates’ farms can play vital but disruptive roles in both of their global futures.
Newsweek contacted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for comment.