Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland.
This is not to say that Bill Gates is a bad guy.
I know very little about Gates personally, but I don't think he's a bad guy by any means. Quite the contrary. Gates is a quietly religious man who, along with his wife, is a dedicated Catholic.* He donates heavily to very serious causes. He's such a philanthropist and, along with Warren Buffet, on a certain edge of things, that he's feared by certain sections of the alt right, that have cooked up, amongst other things, the wild theory that he's responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic in an effort to inject people with microchips and control them through cell towers, which is frankly an absurdly stupid conspiracy theory.
So I'm not saying Gates is a bad guy.
Actually, he seems to be a pretty good guy, to the extent I know anything about him, which admittedly isn't all that much as I don't really find the lives of the famous to be all that interesting.
Rather, what I am saying is that a nation of over 300,000,000 whose economics are heavily scaled towards the wealthy in some ways deprives opportunities to entry farmers, and to those who would become real farmers, by treating land as a freely obtainable resource for people who don't actually use it for their own personal principal income.
Now, again, I can't blame Gates. He didn't create the system, he's simply living it. And to his credit, his farm land is farmed, not retired.
But a nation where most people can't enter the most basic and fundamental livelihood has something existentially wrong with it. That's happened to many nations in the past, and it's always been a fundamental flaw when it occurs.
*In the idiotic way it so often does in American journalism, this has caused one noted journal to comment that Gates departs from his Catholic faith as he "follows science", apparently unaware that Catholics are big believer in science and that most Christian denomination do not hold positions antithetical to science.
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