The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is launching the National Farm Security Action Plan, an aggressive, multiagency effort to protect the United States’s farmland.
At its core, the seven-point plan blocks Chinese nationals from buying U.S. farmland, amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing and increasing alarm over foreign investment in the U.S.’s heartland.
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U.S. farms are “under threat from criminals, from political adversaries, and from hostile regimes that understand our way of life as a profound and existential threat to themselves,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said.
She added that the Department of Agriculture will work with state lawmakers to prohibit purchases “by nationals for countries of concern or other foreign adversaries” and said the federal government is looking for ways to “claw back” past purchases. The USDA is also partnering with the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review foreign purchases involving the farming industry.
Rollins was joined at the press conference by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“No longer can foreign adversaries assume we aren’t watching,” Hegseth said, adding that the Pentagon would move to prohibit farmland sales to foreign adversaries near military bases.
“As someone who’s charged with leading the Defense Department, I want to know who owns the land around our bases and strategic bases and getting an understanding of why foreign entities, foreign companies, foreign individuals might be buying up land around those bases,” he said.
In 2022, a controversial land deal in North Dakota involving Chinese-owned Fufeng Group’s purchase of 370 acres for a corn milling facility about 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base set off national safety concerns. The deal was ultimately blocked by local officials.
China has been buying up strategically placed farmland next to military installations across the U.S. for years. In June 2024, the New York Post identified 19 bases from Florida to Hawaii that were near land bought by Chinese entities, including some of the military’s most strategically important bases in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Killeen, Texas; San Diego, California; and Tampa, Florida.
For years, there has been mounting concern from Republicans and Democrats that Chinese-owned companies are using farmland to spy on the U.S. or wield their influence over food supplies should a conflict arise.
Last month, a Chinese researcher in Michigan and her boyfriend were charged with smuggling a biological pathogen that “can cause devastating diseases in crops” into the U.S.
Yunqing Jian, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and Zunyong Liu were charged with multiple counts, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S., smuggling goods into the country, and making false statements to investigators, according to federal charging documents.
Liu entered the country at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in July when border officers found small bags of the fungus Fusarium graminearum in his backpack. Fusarium graminearum causes a disease that can cripple wheat, barley, maize, and rice. The disease, head blight, has been a problem for U.S. farmers and showed up in 32 states last year, according to USDA-funded research.
Currently, Chinese investors own 265,000 acres of U.S. land, according to USDA data. Of that, about half is tied to Smithfield Foods, which was bought in 2013 by a Chinese conglomerate led by tycoon Wan Long. Another large company is seed and pesticide supplier Syngenta, which is a subsidiary of China National Chemical, a state-owned enterprise known as ChemChina. Syngenta owns about 1,500 acres of U.S. farmland for research, development, and regulatory trials.
Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland has dropped in recent years, declining from 384,000 acres in 2021. Despite China being the primary target, Canada actually owns the most foreign-owned farmland in the U.S. — about 32%, or 14.2 million acres, according to the USDA.
In 2023, the Senate voted 91 to 7 to block businesses based in China from purchasing U.S. farmland. Twenty-six states either limit or outright prohibit non-Americans from purchasing or investing in agricultural land.
The National Farm Security Action Plan will also enhance the country’s agricultural supply chain resilience and protect “U.S. nutrition and safety net from fraud and foreign exploitation,” Rollins said. She added that the plan emphasizes U.S. agricultural research and innovation and will ensure that “America First is in every USDA program, from farm loans to food safety.”
“We have already canceled seven active agreements with entities in foreign countries of concern and will continue to cancel additional agreements moving forward,” Rollins said. “I signed a memo today, which immediately removes 70 citizens from countries of concern that are currently affiliated with the USDA through contracts or research arrangements. And we are working to issue regulatory action to remove over 550 entities from foreign countries of concern from our preferred catalog.”
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The America First Governors’ Council said it strongly supports the plan, describing it as a “decisive and long-overdue response to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) coordinated threat to America’s farmland, food supply, and national sovereignty.”
“For too long, foreign adversaries, most notably the CCP, have quietly exploited lax federal enforcement to buy American farmland, including land near key military installations,” said former Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, co-chairman of the America First Governors’ Council. “This plan ends that era of weakness and starts restoring control of our land to the American people.”