Microsoft founder Bill Gates is currently the proprietor of the most farmland in the United States, as per Land Report.
The Land Report scientists inferred that Gates, presently the fourth richest man in the world, and his wife, Melinda, own 242,000 acres of farmland.
They own approximately 52,000 more acreages than the Offutt family, who sit at No. 2 on Land Report’s list of families who own the most farmland in the U.S.
Altogether, Bill and Melinda Gates have obtained land in excess of a dozen states. Nonetheless, his biggest land holdings are in Louisiana (69,071 acres), Arkansas (47,927 acres), Nebraska (20,588 acres), Arizona (25,750 acres) and Washington state (16,097 acres).
As indicated by Land Report’s exploration, Gates and his wife had hired previous Putnam Investments bond fund manager Michael Larson in 1994 to assist them with expanding their personal assets.
These speculations remembered a stake for AutoNation, the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass., the Four Seasons in San Francisco and upward of 100,000 acres of farmland in different states, Land Report stated, refering to a 2014 profile of Larson in the Wall Street Journal.
In any case, Land Report’s most recent discoveries show that the 100,000 figure has since flooded to more than twice that sum.
Despite the fact that Gates is generally known as the man behind tech behemoth Microsoft, he is no more bizarre to agriculture.
Since the mid 2000s, Gates and his wife have made the invasion into the agriculture space through various investments to help farmers in the developing world.
In 2008, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reported $306 million in grants intended to help the yields and incomes of millions of little ranchers in Africa as well as “other parts of the developing world so they can lift themselves and their families out of hunger and poverty.”
The establishment likewise collaborated with the Department for International Development (DFID) to help agricultural research projects in developing nations to help little ranchers increment their yields and salaries.
Around a year prior, Gates made the not-for-profit Gates Ag One to additional their objectives of supporting agriculture in developing countries.
