Bill Gates is well known in many ways-the founder and long-term director of Microsoft, until recently the richest man in the world, the benefactor and promoter of vaccination and pandemic control, if you ask a conspiracy theorist, yes The villain who secretly plans to enslave and counteract. Eliminate humans with vaccines-but certainly not farmers.
>>Bill Gates: If I don’t spend $2 billion on vaccines, things will get worse
However, according to a report issued by the Urban Land Association in January, Gates has become the world’s largest private owner of agricultural land. According to this report, it dates back to 2018, when it purchased 14,500 acres of first-rate land in Washington State for $171 million, otherwise it would be the traditional territory of the local Yakama tribe.
Through this purchase, Gates became the owner of a total of 242,000 acres of agricultural land in 19 states (from Washington to Arkansas), with a total value of more than US$690 million. Therefore, Gates has a new nickname in The Land Report: Farmer Bill.
In contrast, Gates owns almost the same land as Hong Kong, twice the size of the Bleu Sioux indigenous tribe, wrote Nick Estes, a professor at the University of New Mexico and a member of the tribe. guardian.
However, Gates is not the only wealthy man who hopes to diversify his investment portfolio under the mediation of investment managers and consultants to start purchasing farmland on a large scale. The British “Financial Times” reported that the inflow of funds into arable land investment funds in 2019 reached a record level.
There are many reasons for making such investments-for example, to achieve so-called zero greenhouse gas emissions for their company (causing global warming), which is most easily achieved by planting trees and regenerating poor soil, and then absorbing and storing carbon from the soil. Greenhouse gas, mainly carbon dioxide.
Some billionaires are buying land to improve the image of environmentally-conscious entrepreneurs in other ways. For example, CNN founder Ted Turner bought up to 2 million acres of land (not just farmland), and the last buffalo herd in the United States roamed his 200,000 acres of pasture. Like the ranch, the Buffalo is his private property.
However, according to an article written by Estes for the Guardian, according to the promise of the US government in the 19th century, Turner’s ranch was located on land that should belong to the Lakota tribe.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Danish billionaires Anders Povlsen and Anne Hoch Povlsen plan to return the 200,000 hectares they bought in Scotland to the wild .
“Lynx, bear and wolf…may come back,” Povlseni explained on its website.
Others buy land to try new farming methods. As for Gates, a Reddit user, when accessing this social network in the “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) format, famous or unknown people will answer the user’s questions, and he will ask him why he wants to buy so much arable land.
Gates responded: “My investment team made the purchase decision. It has nothing to do with the climate. The agricultural sector is important. With more production seeds, we can avoid deforestation and help Africa cope with the already felt climate difficulties. It’s not clear how cheap biofuels can become a fuel, but if they are cheap enough, it can solve the problem of emissions from airplanes and trucks.”
In recent years, agriculture has become increasingly integrated into the financial market. Writes that in addition to buying land as another type of property in the investment portfolio, the share of start-ups in the agricultural technology sector, that is, applying new technologies to improve agricultural conditions, has become another rapidly growing investment trend. Financial Times. A new generation of farmers and agricultural investors are trying to find a way to combine profitability with sustainability, which has become more and more important as we increasingly feel the effects of uncontrolled climate change .
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