WHY DO I HAVE A PROBLEM SEEING BILL GATES WITH A PITCH FORK?

 

                     … I’ll bet you didn’t know that Bill Gates is the country’s largest farm owner

 

Bill Gates fortune is in third place after Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

 

Farmers work the land to produce top quality, down home goodness for our tables, but it’s not an easy row to hoe.  (Pun intended)

The farmers have to cope with difficult weather, politics, bad ag policies, and those assorted pests….such as Bill Gates. 

The ultra-rich speculators like him are acquiring huge holdings of America’s productive dirt, mostly grabbing the land for future development riches.  But they are meanwhile, profiting by milking government subsidies meant for those “real farmers”.

With 270,000 acres of ag land in his corporate portfolio, Bill Gates is already the USA’s: Number-one farm-land owner. But he’s also going after even more farms. 

With a personal fortune of 120 billion dollars, he can certainly outbid anyone who really wants to be a real farmer.  Last month, he bought-up 2,100 acres of good cropland in North Dakota.  He bought it, even though the state has a proud historic law prohibiting any corporations from owning farms.

But billionaires don’t obey laws.  They instead hire lawmakers to make any law fit their needs. 

Sure enough, North Dakota’s Republican Attorney General promptly found a workaround so that this Seattle billionaire qualifies as a “North Dakota farmer.”

Somehow, I doubt that we will ever see Mr. Gates wearing a pair of regular farmer’s overalls.

Copyright G. Ater 2022