Rams proprietor Stan Kroenke now the most important personal landowner within the U.S.

A model of this text first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth publication with Robert Frank, a weekly information to the high-net-worth investor and shopper. Enroll to obtain future editions, straight to your inbox.

Stanley Kroenke owns the world’s most dear sports activities empire, together with the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. Now the sports activities tycoon can be America’s largest personal landowner, in response to the newly launched Land Report.

At 2.7 million acres, Kroenke’s holdings are bigger than Yellowstone Nationwide Park — or the equal of roughly 2 million soccer fields.

Kroenke purchased almost 1 million acres of New Mexico ranchland in December from the household behind industrial conglomerate Teledyne, per The Land Report. In line with the commerce publication, the Singleton Ranches transaction is the most important land buy within the U.S. in additional than a decade. Late Teledyne founder Henry Singleton began his namesake ranch within the Nineteen Eighties, and it is grown into one of many nation’s largest cattle- and horse-breeding operations.

The acquisition vaulted Kroenke from fourth to first on The Land Report’s annual rating of the nation’s 100 largest personal landowners, leapfrogging the Emmerson lumber household in addition to billionaire media moguls John Malone and Ted Turner.

Many of the high 100 landowners aren’t boldface names like Kroenke. The Emmerson household, which ranks second, owns an estimated 2.44 million acres by their forest-products firm Sierra Pacific Industries. The Singleton household, which bought the New Mexico ranches to Kroenke, nonetheless made the reduce at 98th place with 171,000 acres.

Nonetheless, investing in U.S. farmland has develop into well-liked among the many extremely rich as a hedge in opposition to inflation and inventory market volatility. From 2019 to 2024, farmland values have grown at a median annual fee of 5.8%, or 2% after inflation, in response to the U.S. Division of Agriculture.

Billionaire entrepreneurs from Invoice Gates to Philip Anschutz are more and more shopping for up swaths of land for farming, ranching and forestry. Gates ranks forty fourth general on The Land Report checklist with 275,000 acres however continues to be the most important personal proprietor of U.S. farmland, particularly. Owned by his funding group, Cascade Funding, Gates’ farmland grows soybeans, corn, cotton, rice and even potatoes used for McDonald’s french fries.

On-line brokerage billionaire Thomas Peterffy and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos additionally made the reduce, with 647,000 acres and 462,000 acres, respectively.

Kroenke has been in a position to develop his land holdings comparatively rapidly by buying huge ranches which have been held in households for many years and even generations. He purchased one in every of his largest ranches, Waggoner Ranch in north Texas, for $725 million in 2016, ending 160 years of household possession. Whereas these one-of-a-kind ranches are briefly provide, extra are hitting the market as heirs resolve to promote relatively than keep it up the household enterprise.