There’s never a Black Friday discount when a piece of Nebraska farmland hits the market in 2023, be it a fertile Platte River Valley field or a vast swath of Sandhills pastureland.

The market’s hot. And corporate farms, both in-state and out, are dipping into their deep pockets to claim increasingly pricey agricultural land.

The nine buyers who spent the most on Nebraska farmland in the past five years are all corporate farming operations, real estate developers or investment firms, a Flatwater Free Press analysis found.

Jeff Burnett runs one of them. His Wyoming-based operation recently paid $20 million for nearly 28,000 acres of ground on the Sandhills’ southern edge. That purchase made his company the second-largest buyer of Nebraska land, by acre, in the past five years.

And, increasingly, small farmers like Bill Alward strike out. Alward moved to his wife’s native Nebraska a few years ago and started a small operation raising cattle and hogs near Fort Calhoun.

He’s trying to expand. He can’t afford it.

“There were some tracts that were available when we first moved here, and I kind of regret not pursuing those because now it’s completely off the table,” Alward says. “I mean, the price per acre … it’s insanity.”

The average price of Nebraska farmland has shot up 41% since 2018, to a record $3,835 per acre, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln annual survey.

The buyers of that land – especially the biggest chunks – include multinational corporations, out-of-state corporate farms and out-of-state investors, according to five years of land sales gathered by a UNL journalism class and analyzed by the Flatwater Free Press.

Seven of the top 10 buyers of land are located outside Nebraska, the analysis shows.

Together, those seven out-of-state buyers spent $246 million.

Investor-driven purchases, to some degree, contribute to the overall price increase, said Adam Pavelka, a Hastings broker and farm manager for farm real estate agency Agri Affiliates.

The Flatwater Free Press spent months analyzing 12,700 sales of Nebraska ag land made in the open market between 2018 and 2022, then navigating a maze of limited liability companies that often hide the actual buyer.

Among the findings:

The single biggest buyer of ag land by acre in Nebraska is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, through a nonprofit tied to a P.O. box in Utah.

North Carolina-based Great Plains Farms spent the most money – $65 million – on land. Belltown Farms, No. 2 in money spent, is an organic farming company with operations in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas.

Gov. Jim Pillen’s company Platte Center West was among the top spenders after acquiring hog farms. The sale amount included buildings and other infrastructure in addition to the land.

Some farmland purchased is no longer farmland. The sales show real estate developers buying ag land to build homes and apartments, and companies like Facebook and Google spending millions to build data centers.

Oft-rumored foreign buyers like China did not appear in the data, but buyers from Canada and subsidiaries of several multinational corporations, including shipping behemoth ULINE, are among the top buyers of Nebraska land.

There are caveats to these conclusions. The sales data, compiled from county records and provided by the Nebraska Department of Revenue, contains errors. The records sometimes list the incorrect sale amount and are sometimes duplicated. Flatwater Free Press reporters manually corrected data entry errors when possible.

But the data still offers insight into where these buyers are from.

Four of the five biggest buyers who acquired the most acres in open-market sales are giant, multi-state operations headquartered in Utah, Wyoming, Wisconsin and North Dakota.

Out-of-state individuals and companies make up less than 10% of the total number of buyers of Nebraska land in the past five years. But out-of-state buyers are prominent at the highest levels: Nearly a third of the top 100 buyers who bought the most land were people or companies from outside Nebraska.

This series, “Who’s Buying Nebraska?” will dive into massive farmland purchases by churches, foreign companies and notable buyers like billionaires Bill Gates and Ted Turner. It will seek to answer who’s buying land and why – and how these purchases shape the reality of modern Nebraska agriculture.

Spiraling land prices are of course good for sellers. But the reality is that many buyers who can afford to pay the highest farmland prices don’t themselves plant soybeans, brand cattle or harvest corn.

“Most people can get pretty much the same price for grain, but where competition plays out is who can bid most aggressively for land,” said Chuck Hassebrook, former director of the Center for Rural Affairs. “So it is the price of land that keeps ordinary folks out.”

For as long as there has been Nebraska farmland for sale, there have been land barons scooping it up.

William Scully, an Irishman and one of the original foreign owners of Nebraska land, bought up more than 65,000 acres of farmland in Gage and Nuckolls counties in the 1880s. Starting in 1888, cattleman Bartlett Richards claimed, bought and in some cases illegally fenced an estimated 500,000 acres of Sandhills ranch land while co-founding the iconic Spade Ranch.

But for much of Nebraska’s history, it remained possible for residents to make a living on small plots of land that they owned and passed through generations.

Hooper-area farmer Sharon Thernes, 85, remembers her father raising a family of four children on 80 acres, growing crops and raising cows, chickens and pigs.

Today, she says, it would take 10 times as many acres to support a family that size. And the land would be lined exclusively with row crops, she said.

Technology spurred this transition to specialized monocropping and concentrated livestock production, says Bruce Johnson, retired UNL agricultural economics professor who started and ran the Nebraska Farm Real Estate Report survey for nearly 40 years. It’s one reason, he said, why farm and ranch operations are expanding in size while dwindling in number.

Johnson started noticing this trend toward bigger and fewer ag operations in the 1970s.

It accelerated during the 1980s farm crisis, as more and more farmers sold land amid plummeting crop prices. In the aftermath, some financial management companies began to specialize in farmland investment, wrote sociologist Madeleine Fairbairn in her book “Fields of Gold,” a history of farmland financialization.

Federal government reforms in the next decade provided a cushion for ag producers. It also reduced the risk of farmland as an investment, Johnson said.

Buying up farmland as an investment vehicle picked up steam after the 2008 financial crisis, Fairbairn wrote. Many investors now see it as a hedge against inflation.

In 1982, Nebraska voters passed a law that reined in corporations’ ability to own ag land. But in 2007 a federal circuit court struck down that law, known as Initiative 300. Nebraska now has virtually no restrictions on corporate ownership of land – fewer restrictions than the seven other states that at one point passed an Initiative 300-like law, said Anthony Schutz, a UNL professor specializing in agricultural law.

“Absent some legislative change or something of that nature, I think the investor pool is gonna continue,” said Pavelka.

These investors often hire local helpers – sometimes farm managers like Pavelka – or rent out the ground.

It’s common for beginning farmers to start by renting land. But for Alward, it’s proven a challenge to find the 150 acres he’s looking to lease next year for his cattle and pigs. Having pastures next to each other would save him serious time. Owning those pastures would over the long haul save him money.

His dilemma is one understood by many younger American farmers.

About 10,000 young farmers and ranchers surveyed nationwide reported owning slightly more than 80 acres on average, according to a 2022 survey. Nearly half don’t own any land, instead working as managers or hired hands.

Owning land is key, largely because it helps agricultural producers withstand market turbulence, said Hassebrook.

“Even if you’re not super wealthy, that ownership of land …  becomes an enormous value to you in weathering the dry years and low price years,” he said.

It can pay for a lifetime, or several. Ranch land is often bought in large chunks and added to existing ranches, Johnson said. That land may stay in a family for generations.

“As you have larger-sized holdings, the … available land to buy and the ownership transition becomes less and less,” Johnson said.

Burnett isn’t looking to sell anytime soon.

His Wyoming-based operation uses the 28,000-acre ranch land in Keith and Arthur counties to graze cattle from spring ‘til fall. The Sandhills is in a different weather belt than other land, and thus offers him drought protection.

Technology is another big reason buying large amounts of Nebraska land makes sense for his business, he said. Forty years ago, hauling animals hundreds of miles would have been unimaginable. Now he receives iPhone alerts when his livestock water tanks at the ranch run dry.

He wants to make sure he’s building an enterprise with opportunities for the next generation of ranchers in his family.

“We’re long-term players,” said Burnett. “For the cards that I can see today, I would say we’d be more apt to be on the buyer side than on the seller side.”

He doesn’t see himself as an absentee owner, living just across the Wyoming border and visiting often.

The change in Nebraska’s farmland ownership structure, experts say, can have a long-lasting impact on the environment, food production, local economies and the lives and livelihoods of rural residents.

In some eastern Nebraska counties, more than half the farmland is titled to an absentee owner, Johnson said. The latest U.S. Department of Agriculture land ownership survey shows that a third of Nebraska agricultural landlords have never farmed.

In neighboring Iowa, 27% of agricultural land purchases last year were connected to an investor buyer, up from 21% in 2019, according to an Iowa State University survey.

These absentee owners do contribute to the local property tax base. But they don’t live in the community, shop at the grocery store or send their children to the local school.

Instead, they extract value from the land, and send the profits elsewhere, which can “impair the health of rural communities,” said Jessica Shoemaker, a UNL law professor.

“When an owner is instead an investor making decisions in a boardroom in Chicago or New York, we worry that … (they) may not care as much about local impacts,” Shoemaker said.

A higher rate of absent ag landowners in an area corresponds to lower local employment rate, a 2021 USDA report found.

It’s often hard – but not impossible – for mid-sized Nebraska farmers to buy land.

In 2020, Hooper farmer Sharon Thernes took out loans to buy 230 acres of land she had rented for more than 50 years.

Thernes’ grandson Tyler now runs the day-to-day operations on her farm. He also recently bought 74 acres himself.

Thernes has spent a lifetime heading out on the family farm “at two o’clock in the morning to see if the cow is having her calf and carry it to the house to warm it up.”

She’s not optimistic that her family will retain that full control for many more generations to come.

“Eventually … it will be huge conglomerates that are owning the farm,” Thernes said. “… and our grandchildren will be employees.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Learn more at flatwaterfreepress.org.