AFIDA in the United States: how foreign owners report farmland

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The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978, known as AFIDA, does not stop anyone buying American farmland. It requires them to say so. Under it, a foreign person who acquires, transfers or holds an interest in American agricultural land must report it to the Secretary of Agriculture. The report is a form, the deadline is short, and the penalty for missing it is measured against the value of the land itself.

The duty falls on the foreign holder, and it reaches further than the word "farmland" suggests: a wooded tract of a little over ten acres, a long ground lease for wind turbines and an American company with a foreign shareholder can all be inside it.

This guide sets out the federal rule as it stands on 10 October 2026: who counts as a foreign person, which land counts, what the form asks, the deadlines, where the report goes, how penalties are calculated and contested, what the Department of Agriculture has changed since 2024, and what its latest figures show. State laws that restrict foreign ownership are a separate subject and are not covered here.

Deadline and penalty: 7 U.S.C. chapter 66 and 7 CFR part 781. Acreage: Department of Agriculture AFIDA annual report, data as of 31 December 2024.

A disclosure law, not a ban

AFIDA sits in chapter 66 of title 7 of the United States Code, sections 3501 to 3508. The Department of Agriculture's own description, in a release of 22 January 2026, is that the Act became law in 1978. Section 3501 creates the reporting duty, section 3502 the civil penalty, and section 3503 lets the Secretary of Agriculture monitor compliance and verify that reports are accurate.

The working detail is in the regulations, part 781 of title 7 of the Code of Federal Regulations. The electronic edition of that code shows the part as issued in 1984 and unchanged since the start of 2017.

The reports are not private. Section 3506 requires each one to be available for public inspection at the Department in Washington within 10 days of receipt, and section 3505 requires the Secretary, within 30 days after the end of each six-month period, to send copies of the reports for land in a state to that state's agriculture department.

Who counts as a foreign person

Section 781.2(g) of the regulations lists four kinds of foreign person.

The first is an individual who is not a citizen or national of the United States, not a citizen of the Northern Mariana Islands or the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and not lawfully admitted for permanent residence or paroled into the country. A permanent resident is therefore outside the definition; a person living in the United States on another footing is inside it.

The second is an entity, other than an individual or a government, that is organised under the laws of a foreign government or has its principal place of business outside all of the states. "State" takes in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the other territories and possessions.

The third is any foreign government.

The fourth is the one that catches American companies. An entity organised under the law of a state is a foreign person when a "significant interest or substantial control" in it is held, directly or indirectly, by people or bodies of the first three kinds, alone or in combination.

Section 781.2(k) puts numbers on that phrase. A significant interest or substantial control exists when:

• a single foreign individual, entity or government holds 10 per cent or more;
• several of them acting in concert hold 10 per cent or more between them, even if none reaches 10 per cent alone;
• several of them not acting in concert hold 50 per cent or more in aggregate.

A Delaware company with one overseas shareholder at 10 per cent is thus a foreign person for AFIDA. So is a domestic partnership in which six unrelated overseas investors, each with 9 per cent, together hold 54 per cent. A "person" under the regulation includes corporations, partnerships, trusts and estates.

Which land counts, and the ten-acre test

Section 781.2(b) of the regulations defines agricultural land as land in the United States used for forestry production, or land currently used for farming, ranching or timber production. Idle land counts if it was last used for one of those purposes within the past five years.

Forestry production is defined by tree cover, not by logging. It means land exceeding 10 acres in which 10 per cent is stocked by trees of any size, and it includes formerly treed land that will be regenerated naturally or artificially.

Then comes the exception that matters for small tracts. Land is not agricultural land when it does not exceed ten acres in the aggregate and the annual gross receipts from the sale of products produced on it do not exceed US$1,000. Both halves must be met.

This is how a purchase that looks residential can fall inside a farm disclosure law. Consider three worked examples, each assuming a foreign individual as buyer and each offered only to show how the definition reads.

A house on 6 acres with a hay field whose crop is sold for US$1,500 a year fails the receipts half of the exception, so the land is agricultural. A house on 14 acres that was grazed three years ago and now lies idle fails the acreage half and falls within the five-year look-back. A cabin on 12 wooded acres with no farm activity at all can meet the forestry definition, since the tract exceeds 10 acres and trees cover more than a tenth of it. In each case the outcome turns on facts about the land.

The regulation also deals with land that changes character. A foreign person who holds land that was not agricultural and later becomes so must report within 90 days of the change. One whose reported land stops being agricultural must, within 90 days, file a revised form or a written notice giving the date the use ended.

Interests that trigger a report, and those that do not

The duty attaches to "any interest" in agricultural land, and section 781.2(c) defines that as all interest acquired, transferred or held by a foreign person, with six exceptions:

• security interests, which the regulation defines as a mortgage or other debt-securing instrument;
• leaseholds of less than 10 years;
• contingent future interests;
• noncontingent future interests that do not become possessory when the present estate ends;
• surface or subsurface easements and rights of way used for purposes unrelated to agricultural production;
• interests solely in mineral rights.

A foreign lender holding a mortgage on a farm has nothing to report under AFIDA for that mortgage alone. A foreign tenant on a five-year farm lease has nothing to report; a tenant on a lease of 10 years or more does. And ownership is not the test: the Department's annual report for 2024 estimates that roughly 10.6 million foreign-held agricultural acres are tied to wind energy leases, and that less than 1 per cent of that land, about 41,000 acres, is owned outright.

Indirect holdings are covered too. The Department's January 2026 release puts it this way: AFIDA reaches foreign persons with a direct or indirect interest in agricultural land, and an indirect interest counts only where the foreign person has a significant interest or substantial control in the direct holder.

The 90-day clock

Every deadline in the regulation for a new event is the same length. The table sets out the events in section 781.3 and what each one requires.

In the third row no land changes hands. An American company that owns a ranch and then admits an overseas investor at 10 per cent becomes a foreign person on that day, and its 90 days start to run although the deed is untouched.

The last row is a continuing duty. Section 781.3(k) requires the foreign person to keep its legal address current, along with the information about the holders behind it, and section 781.4 treats a failure to keep a submitted report accurate as a violation in its own right.

What Form FSA-153 asks

Section 781.3(e) lists what the report must contain:

• the legal name and address of the foreign person;
• the citizenship of an individual; for an entity, its nature and name, the country where it is organised and its principal place of business;
• the type of interest held;
• the legal description of the land and its acreage;
• the purchase price or other consideration, any amount still owed, and the current estimated value of the land;
• on a transfer, the name, address and citizenship or entity details of the person receiving the interest;
• the agricultural purpose for which the land is intended to be used;
• the name, address and relationship of any representative who completes the form;
• how the land was acquired or transferred, the foreign person's relationship to the previous owner, producer, manager, tenant or sharecropper, and the rental agreement;
• the date of the acquisition or transfer.

The value entered on the form has a second life. Under section 781.4(c), the price or estimate the foreign person reports, as verified or adjusted by the county committee, is treated as the fair market value on which any penalty is worked out.

An entity has more to do. Under section 781.3(f), a foreign person that is not an individual or a government must also file a report on each foreign individual or government holding a significant interest or substantial control in it, and may be asked for information on its other interest holders. Under section 781.3(g), an entity named in that second report can in turn be required, on request, to report who holds significant interests in it. The Department can thus work up a chain of ownership one tier at a time.

Where the report goes: county office or online portal

The regulation names the place. Section 781.3(a) says the report is filed at the Farm Service Agency county office where the land is located, or the county office that administers programmes on it. The agency's Washington office may allow direct filing in complex cases, and the regulation gives land spread across several counties as an example.

Since 22 January 2026 there has been a second route. On that date the Department of Agriculture launched an online portal for AFIDA reports. According to its release and the Farm Service Agency's AFIDA page, users sign in through the federal government's single sign-on service, the portal collects the same information as Form FSA-153, and the paper form remains available to those who prefer it. The agency asks filers not to use both channels for the same report.

The two sources date the mandate differently. The Department's release says the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 first required it to streamline electronic submission of AFIDA disclosures. The notes to chapter 66 in the United States Code set out a provision of Public Law 118-42, enacted on 9 March 2024, giving the Secretary two years to establish that process, and cite the 2023 Act as containing similar provisions.

What a late or missing report costs

Section 3502 of the statute lets the Secretary impose a civil penalty on a person who fails to file a required report, or who knowingly files one that is incomplete, misleading or false. The amount may not exceed 25 per cent of the fair market value of the interest on the date of assessment.

Section 781.4 of the regulations turns that ceiling into a scale with two steps.

A late report costs one-tenth of one per cent of the fair market value of the interest for each week, or part of a week, that the violation continues, up to 25 per cent. A report that is incomplete, misleading or false, a failure to file, and a failure to keep a report accurate are each set at 25 per cent. An incomplete report becomes a violation when it is not corrected within 30 days of the letter returning it.

A worked example, with assumed figures: an interest whose fair market value is US$800,000, reported 20 weeks after the deadline. Twenty weeks at 0.1 per cent is 2 per cent, and 2 per cent of US$800,000 is US$16,000. At that weekly rate the 25 per cent ceiling is reached after 250 weeks, a little under five years, when the penalty on the same interest would be US$200,000.

The regulation allows the figure to come down. Section 781.4(b)(3) lists what may be weighed: the total time the violation lasted, how it was discovered, extenuating circumstances, and the nature of the information that was misstated or left out.

Fair market value is fixed on the date the penalty is assessed. If the land is no longer agricultural, it is fixed on the date it was last used as agricultural land. The Farm Service Agency makes the determination.

How a penalty is notified and contested

Section 781.5 sets the procedure, and its central deadline is 60 days.

The 60 days run from the mailing of the notice, not from its receipt. A written denial, with factual data, goes to the Administrator of the Farm Service Agency; a hearing is requested under part 780 of the same title.

The final penalty cannot exceed the amount stated in the notice of apparent liability, and a person who pays while contesting is refunded if found not liable.

Where there is no response or no payment, the regulation provides for the matter to be referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution in the appropriate federal district court. Under section 3502 of the statute it is the Attorney General who brings the civil action to recover a penalty. Separately, any Department of Agriculture programme payments approved for the person may be set off against the penalty.

Enforcement since 2024 and the rule under review

The annual report for 2024 includes a table of penalties. It records a total of US$245,357 assessed in 2025. The largest single penalty was US$80,119, for late filing, assessed in June 2025 and paid in September 2025. The second largest was US$36,810, also assessed in June 2025, which the report lists as unpaid.

The same report says that past staffing shortages created backlogs of filings and that the figures come from manual entry of paper forms. An advance notice the Department published in the Federal Register on 29 December 2025 cites a Government Accountability Office report of 18 January 2024, which found that the Department did not share AFIDA data in a timely way and made six recommendations, among them better verification and monitoring.

In July 2025 the Department launched its National Farm Security Action Plan. A public page that is part of the plan lets farmers, ranchers and members of the public report suspected non-compliance with AFIDA, anonymously if they wish. The portal followed in January 2026.

The December 2025 notice, titled "Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act: Revisions to Reporting Requirements" and published at 90 FR 60581, was an advance notice of proposed rulemaking: a request for views before any text is drafted. It raised three topics: the identification of required filers, including the definitions and the treatment of foreign adversaries; information about the land, including a geospatial description; and indirect foreign interest holders. Comments closed on 28 January 2026.

A proposed rule is reported to have followed: according to a briefing published in July 2026 by the law firm publication Cleary Trade Watch, the Department published one on 25 June 2026 with comments due by 10 August 2026, but the proposal was not confirmed on a government page for this guide and its content is not described here. Part 781 remained unchanged in the electronic Code of Federal Regulations on 7 October 2026, and the figures of the rule in force are summarised below.

Whether and when a final rule is issued is not known from the sources read.

What the latest figures show

The Department's most recent annual report, sent to Congress on 22 January 2026, counts holdings as of 31 December 2024. Foreign persons held an interest in 46,277,051 acres of agricultural land, which the report puts at 3.6 per cent of privately held agricultural land and about 2 per cent of all land in the United States. That was 1,349,598 acres more than the 44,927,453 acres recorded a year earlier.

Of all acres reported, including a small non-agricultural share, forest accounts for 22,232,297 acres, about 47 per cent. Cropland is 13,659,875 acres, about 29 per cent. Pasture and other agricultural land together make up about 22 per cent.

By country of investor, Canada is far ahead with 16,131,408 acres, 34 per cent of the reported total. The Netherlands follows with 4,699,916 acres, or 10 per cent, then Germany with 2,770,565, Italy with 2,680,994 and the United Kingdom with 2,668,327, each about 6 per cent. Chinese investors held 247,659 agricultural acres, which the report describes as slightly less than 1 per cent of foreign-held acres and treats as a minimum, because each holding is recorded under its primary investor. Eight new acquisitions by Chinese investors were reported in 2024.

Ranked by share instead of acres, the order changes. Foreign persons held 21.3 per cent of privately held agricultural land in Maine and 17.1 per cent in Hawaii, followed by Michigan at 8.8 per cent, Louisiana at 8.6 per cent and Washington at 8.3 per cent. In Texas, the largest by acreage, the share was 3.7 per cent. The report itself notes that the 90-day window and late filings mean the most recent transactions may not yet appear.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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