Professor Jessica Shoemaker’s article, Trading Acres, has been published by the Yale Law Journal. The article is co-authored by former Nebraska Law professor James Tierney.
In this article, Shoemaker and Tierney argue that Wall Street's arrival at rural America's gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices. Trading Acres reveals how property, corporate, and securities law are fueling a new rural land grab, transforming farmland into an asset.
Abstract: Farms are places where people live their lives, sustain their families, and produce food and fiber for the wider community. Today, however, farms are becoming assets swept up into global financial channels—converting from repositories of agrarian ideals into paper playthings for the very rich. This transformation of farmland reflects broader patterns of financialization occurring across multiple elements of daily life and compounds wider crises of concentration and industrialization in agriculture. But as an active land grab unfolds across rural America, farmland’s recent capture by absentee investors is especially concerning, threatening rural livelihoods, agricultural and food-system resilience, economic and spatial justice, and—in our estimation—democracy itself. In this Article, we argue that Wall Street’s arrival at rural America’s gate is not merely a market trend but rather the product of deep social choices governing the accumulation of investor wealth: property, corporate, and securities law. We explore the ways in which these definitional features of the American legal system—from the primacy of market logics to a range of biases that skew spatial, temporal, and social relations—create the conditions for the profound transformation now underway: the process by which farmland—a basic and essential rural resource—is being integrated into the modern capital economy. Today’s rural land grab is meeting little resistance. But historically, investor-owned farmland was seen as a deep and politically motivating threat to rural life. We analyze past attempts to rein in the financialization of farmland and argue that many failed because modest doctrinal reforms provide no match for the deeper legal structures privileging profit-driven investment, even in land. Sophisticated financial actors easily maneuver to exploit definitional loopholes and other opportunities for evasion, resulting in what we frame as a pattern of “playing shell games with finance.” After exploring past reforms, we turn to modern obstacles to change and conclude that, despite these ongoing challenges, opportunities still exist to address the harms that follow from financialized farmland ownership. Such reforms, however, require legal and policy frameworks that create more robust systems of democratic land governance, rural community resilience, and sustainable food production. We end with possible interventions aimed at building this more equitable and sustainable future, emphasizing movement work that democratizes rural land relations and values the deeply rooted knowledge and experience of the people who live in and care about the countryside.
