https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1964-2938
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Novel investment vehicles continue to dominate discussions of the financial entities driving the global land rush. However, less attention has been devoted to the mundane elements of such investment, primarily the corporate structure that undergirds it. Using US public records, our analysis reveals how absentee and complex corporate structures enable the financialization of farmland. While the latest farmland investment has the fresh face of the who, such as private equity funds, we conclude that the what of its corporate skeleton is older, calling for dialogue between studies of corporate organization, landownership, and financialization.
Acknowledgement
Ashwood and Canfield shared first-author responsibilities for this paper and are listed alphabetically. The majority of the research and writing for this project was completed while Ashwood and Canfield were affiliated with Auburn University’s Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. The reviewers played a formative role in the paper’s final form, and we thank them for their crucial insights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Proudhon ([Citation1890] Citation1970, 43) wrote that ‘A lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor,’ capturing in abhorrently sexist, but strikingly clear terms, his fundamental critique of property: that the proprietor (owner) is not the same as the possessor. This line of thinking influences our emphasis on proprietors, alongside creditors, to complicate discussions of possession.
2 Corporations are particularly adept at confusing the who and what distinction. Corporations gained their first foothold into legal status as persons in the late 1800s; since that time, corporations have been extended most rights afforded to any human individual in democracy (Roy Citation1997). The legal system maintains some hints of the classical liberalism of John Locke, where laborers reap the rewards of their work through property. Still, the corporate reconstruction of capitalism has largely stripped the legal system of any real meaning in this regard. Corporations have legally gained an unrivaled confluence of power, culminating in ‘preeminence in the pursuit of profit, preeminence in property rights, and preeminence over the public, and preeminence in its status as person’ (Ashwood Citation2018, 73).
3 In these categorizations, C-and S-corporations were aggregated under ‘Corporations’ because neither the tax parcel data nor Nexis differentiates the two.
4 Also, the category ‘Others’ included many corporate forms that could not be categorized as a corporate entity in our analysis. In some cases, these may have been mislabeled in the tax parcel data and were thus recategorized during the analysis.
5 In county means that the farm proprietor was a within county individual or corporate entity; surrounding counties means the corresponding address was in a county adjacent to Fulton or McDonough, respectively; any corresponding location in any other county within the state constitutes greater Illinois; and out-of-state means proprietors in any other state.
6 When the financial reports did not uncover any creditors and debtors but we did find biographical financial information on individuals, we determined the creditors that provided loans directly to those executives. See Table 2 for more detail.
7 It should be noted that even on Nexis, this link was not easily established. There are two Brickyard Farm, LLCs, one incorporated as a Delaware LLC and one in Columbia, Illinois.
8 Farmland Partners sued Rota Fortunae, accusing it of conspiring in the report to distort their company’s value in false and defamatory ways.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Loka Ashwood
Loka Ashwood is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She studies corporate and regulatory structures that prompt animosity toward the state in rural communities. Her study of democracy and social action uncovers opportunities for change. She published the book, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government is Losing the Trust of Rural America (Yale 2018), and is co-author of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (6th edition, Sage, fall 2020).
John Canfield
John Canfield, Jr. is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His interests include landownership, financialization, food regimes, and the organizational forms of corporations. He is currently working on a project studying the tensions between cattle producers and environmental groups in rural Montana as well as a project mapping and analyzing the corporate structures and networks of power in US industrial hog production.
Madeleine Fairbairn
Madeleine Fairbairn, PhD, is a sociologist and assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies the political economy of agriculture, including the financial sector’s growing interest in farmland and, more recently, the Silicon Valley agri-food tech sector. Her first book, Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush out in July 2020 with Cornell University Press.
Kathryn De Master
Kathryn De Master is a rural sociologist and associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on agricultural transitions in the US and internationally, and she studies farmland access and financialization, the ‘agriculture of the middle,’ diversified farming systems, and the agri-food tech sector. De Master’s co-edited book Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning, was recently published with the University of California Press.