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　　[As of now, Bill Gates owns about 270,000 acres, Amazon e-commerce giant Jeff Bezos also owns 420,000 acres, and American media tycoon Turner owns about 2 million acres. ]

　　What makes the rich Americans indulge in "farming"?

　　In recent months, the richest Americans have traveled west to buy real estate. According to foreign media reports, recently, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been approved by the North Dakota judicial department to buy about 850 hectares of local farmland. Previously, his Red River Trust purchased a large tract of farmland in northeastern North Dakota for $13.5 million.

　　As of now, Bill Gates owns about 270,000 acres of land, Amazon e-commerce giant Jeff Bezos also owns 420,000 acres of land, and American media tycoon Turner owns about 2 million acres of land.

　　Farmland looks like an attractive investment in a period of soaring inflation and high volatility in stock prices, Wang Xuanren, co-founder of FarMatters and Chengshiyounong, an agri-food industry agency, said in an interview with China Business News. "It's a real asset that performs well in an inflationary environment, provides stable returns over long-term holdings, and has a low correlation to financial assets," he said.

　　Farmland investment returns outperform U.S. stocks?

　　The average annual return on U.S. farmland investments for the 25 years through 2021 is 11.2 percent, according to commercial real estate analytics firm Green Street. That compares with an average annual return of 9.6% for the S&P 500 over the same period. In terms of volatility, the S&P 500 has historically been twice as volatile as farmland investments.

　　In Wang Xuanren’s view, in addition to the investment perspective, it is necessary to return to the essential attributes of land and understand land as a resource, which is closely related to food security. The supply is decreasing year by year, and the amount of undeveloped land is also decreasing. At the same time, the global population is increasing, which will drive the growth of global food demand. This means that the future food may face a situation of short supply. In this context , as the upstream of food - the value of land resources will become more and more prominent."

　　More than 11 million acres of U.S. farmland have been converted, subdivided or covered by development projects over the past 20 years, according to a report by the American Farmland Trust. So far, agricultural land in the U.S. has fallen to nearly 44 percent of its land area, according to the World Bank. The latest forecast from the United Nations shows that the global population will grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030 and around 9.7 billion in 2050.

　　More to build an agricultural science and technology ecological chain?

　　In an interview with British media, Bill Gates also admitted that less than 1% of the farmland he owns is used for grazing livestock, and the rest is used for growing crops. In addition, he discussed interest in investing in meat product producers, "all rich countries should move to 100 percent synthetic beef."

　　And some of Bill Gates' ideas are gradually moving from the laboratory to reality. According to US media reports, up to now, many vegetables such as carrots, soybeans and potatoes have been grown on the farmland in nearly 20 states owned by Bill Gates, some of which have eventually become the French fries on the McDonald's table.

　　Wang Xuanren said: "Most of the richest people who buy land at present are technology veterans, and some people also have a huge agricultural technology investment territory. For example, Bill Gates can turn his 270,000-acre farm into the largest agricultural, food and climate related farm. A test bed for technology to test and develop technologies such as artificial meat and biofuels.”

　　Wang Xuanren believes that in agricultural science and technology investment, having high-quality land resources is the first step for him to carry out agricultural science and technology experiments and applications. This is because chemical fertilization is currently used on farmland in the United States, and high-quality land is relatively scarce. After becoming a farmland investor, Bill Gates has the reason and power to require the growers of his farmland to implement sustainable farming methods such as crop rotation, thereby increasing the value of the land.

　　"Not only that, from the perspective of agricultural technology investment territory, Bill Gates has also invested in artificial meat and plant meat companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, and owns shares in agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere." He further analyzed, "In the future If these products are put into production on a large scale, it is bound to compete with existing traditional crops to obtain planting area. Having their own fields will avoid the trouble of competition, which will help the above-mentioned companies to develop collaboratively and jointly build an ecological chain of future agricultural technology. "