Shoemaker & Tierney: Trading Acres

In Trading Acres, Jessica A. Shoemaker (Nebraska Law and, full disclosure, Rural Reconciliation Project co-creator) and James Fallows Tierney (Chicago-Kent College of Law) address the growing financialization of farmland.  

Financialization of farmland is a process by which farmland is transformed into an investment asset. This process lets farmlands be treated as a distinct investment category, like stocks and bonds. Reframing farmland as an asset class transforms farmland from home place and community resource into a more abstract, commodified vehicle for absentee profit generation.  

The authors identify potential harms of financialized farmland, focusing on negative impacts on rural communities, physical environments, democracy, and inequality. For example, the authors highlight how an investor’s focus on short-term returns and profit may subordinate reinvestment in and care for the local community. This can also lead to decisions prioritizing short-term yield while degrading biodiversity and long-term food-system resilience.  

Shoemaker and Tierney’s primary contribution is to emphasize how the current trend toward financialized farmland is constituted through law. They unpack how legal choices made real through property, corporate, and securities law actively encourage wealth concentration and absentee investor control over more local, family-based ownership. Ultimately, law enables financialization through doctrines that tend to favor the accumulation of wealth over other values, such as land stewardship, equity, and community control. 

Because of these deep pro-financialization legal structures, the authors show how more superficial legal reforms to try to reign in investor land grabs have been ineffective so far. They highlight, for example, the reality of "playing shell games with finance,” with sophisticated investors and their intermediaries often able to evade and circumvent (or even exploit to their own advantage) regulatory interventions. To date, most attempts to reform current doctrine have been too superficial. 

Shoemaker and Tierney suggest a series of possible interventions that already exist. For instance, recent changes enacted in Scotland discourage farmland as an asset by granting communities a right of first refusal or a right to purchase certain lands. In the United States, a possible intervention is proposed bill S. 2583, known as the Farmland for Farmers Act, which targets corporate ownership of farmland. 

In conclusion, this article highlights the possibilities and limitations of regulatory responses to financialized farmland. Future reforms need to look beyond the law of investment, and towards more radical and innovative strategies to address concerns of rural community welfare, sustainable agriculture, and economic justice.