Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) sent a letter to House Agriculture Committee chairman David Scott (D-Ga.), requesting that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates testify before the committee regarding the billionaire’s large farmland purchases.
Gates is the “largest private farmland owner” in the United States, possessing almost 270,000 acres of farmland in 19 states, the July 20 letter states. The average farm size in 2021 was only 445 acres, Johnson said citing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Gates’s farmland holdings in the United States are a “significant” portion that the committee “should not ignore,” while asking that the billionaire be brought in to testify about his “farming interests and practices.”
