Mormon Church Buys 370,000 Acres of Ranch Land (2024)

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Mormon Church Buys 370,000 Acres of Ranch Land? ›

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has bought nearly 370,000 acres of Nebraska agricultural land in recent years, and John Hansen tells Brownfield it's creating some challenges for the state's farmers and ranchers.

The church sees its land buys as a force for good, an investment in agriculture “to generate long-term value to support the Church's religious, charitable, and humanitarian good works,” said a Farmland Reserve spokesman.

The Nebraska land is just one slice of the 1.7 million acres of American real estate the Mormon church is now estimated to own. That 1.7 million-acre total is likely an undercount, said Truth and Transparency co-founder Ryan McKnight, because it only includes corporations definitively traced back to the church.

Boasting a vast portfolio, spanning 678,000 acres throughout the state, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church, has become the largest landowner in the state, possessing nearly 2% of Florida's total land mass.

The church sees its land buys as a force for good, an investment in agriculture “to generate long-term value to support the Church's religious, charitable, and humanitarian good works,” said a Farmland Reserve spokesman.

Roman Catholic Church: 70 million hectares

The largest landowner in the world is not a major oil magnate or a real estate investor. No, it's the Roman Catholic Church.

People own most farmland. Some 2.6 million owners are individuals or families, and they own more than two thirds of all farm acreage. Fewer than 32,500 non family held corpor ations own farmland, and they own less than 5 percent of all U.S. farmland. Farmland owners hold an aver age of about 280 acres each.

Its biggest tracts in Missouri, perhaps not surprisingly, are in Jackson County on the Kansas border, with Independence as its county seat. The faith has more than 10,000 acres countywide, with 5,920 acres held in and around Independence's city limits.

Based on the Utah land ownership data released in May 2009 by the State of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration and the Utah Automated Geographic Reference Center, federal lands comprise 64.3 percent of Utah; state lands comprise 10 percent of Utah; private lands comprise 21.1 percent of Utah; and ...

How many cows does the Mormon Church own? ›

Covering almost 300,000 acres (1,200 km²) of land, 90 ranchers and their families live on the ranch. The ranch maintains 44,000 head of beef cattle. It is a for-profit operation and is not a normal part of the humanitarian efforts of the LDS Church. Gordon B.

The 2022 Land Report 100, compiled each year by The Land Report magazine, released its annual list of landowners who own the most acres in the United States. The nation's largest private landowners are the Emmerson family in California who own over 2.4 million acres.

Additionally, investigative journalism from the Truth & Transparency Foundation in 2022 suggests the church may be the owner of the most valuable real estate portfolio in the United States, with a minimum market value of $15.7 billion.

According to Mormon founder and prophet Joseph Smith, the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri. After the Fall, Adam traveled east of Eden, to what is now Daviess County, to the spot Mormons call Adam-Ondi-Ahman. The church now owns over 3,000 acres here, rolling farm land along the Grand River.

A Mormon agricultural empire

Its findings show the Mormon church now owns around $2billion worth of farmland across the US, covering around 859,000 acres, more land than Bill Gates (270,000 acres) and China (383,935) combined.

In 1846, a group of pioneer members of the Church of Latter-day Saints traveled west from Illinois to escape the violent opposition of non-Mormons. They arrived in a desolate area past the Western border of the United States in 1847, calling the land they claimed "Deseret."

In fact, the U.S. government owns nearly half of all land in the West. This is partly due to the fact that a lot of the territory in the western United States is either mountainous or dry and infertile, and wasn't readily snatched up by homesteaders.

Most ex-Mormons leave Mormonism and the LDS or RLDS Church because of intellectual reasons for finding the religion false or practices of Mormon organizations. The foremost reasons are disbelief both in Joseph Smith as a prophet and in the Book of Mormon as a religious and historical document.

Why it matters: The church has long been scrutinized by members and nonmembers for secrecy about its vast wealth, estimated to exceed $100 billion.

The Mormons also had other reasons for moving: The Gentiles persecuted them. In 1846 Brigham Young (by now leader of the Mormons) told the US President, James K. Polk, that the Mormons had decided to leave the country for the sake of peace .