A Chinese company owns 160 acres of farmland just a mile and a half from Fort Riley as the crow flies.
Is that a problem? President Donald Trump thinks so.
The land is three parcels near I-70 in Geary County, according to records obtained by The Mercury. The plots are unassuming — some fields, greenhouses, outbuildings and a small house.
But the company that owned the land since 2002, Syngenta Seeds, is part of a corporation with a net worth of $30 billion and was involved in a number of lawsuits, including a class-action claim over genetically modified corn seeds which tanked the corn market and resulted in Syngenta making a $1.5 billion settlement.
The White House and top officials this week rolled out a plan aimed at limiting foreign ownership of farm and ranch land.
They say there is growing national security concern about the rise in foreign countries owning agricultural land, especially near military installations.
"We feed the world," Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said Tuesday. "We lead the world. And we'll never let foreign adversaries control our land, our labs or our livelihoods."
The National Farm Security Action Plan aims to secure and protect American farmland, safeguard the food supply and strengthen critical infrastructure, according to documents from the White House.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R- Kansas, said he wants China to "get the hell out of American agriculture."
"For the last several years, we've been trying to scream as loud as we could that China's buying more and more farmland in America," he said Thursday on RFD-TV. "And it's not just the quantity, it's where they're purchasing it. If you could imagine, Whiteman Air Force Base (in Missouri) is where those B-2 bombers took off and took out the Iranian nuclear facilities. The Chinese have purchased land next to that base. Same way at Fort Riley — at many of the military bases, the Chinese have purchased property."
Marshall said he was glad to see Trump appoint Rollins to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which gives Rollins a role in deciding whether a foreign purchase could be a threat.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice charged foreign nationals, including a Chinese Communist Party member, with smuggling into the country a noxious fungus — an agroterrorism weapon potentially responsible for billions in global crop losses.
Lest we think such conspiracies can't happen here, faithful readers will remember in 2018, a Chinese scientist who lived in Manhattan was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for stealing samples of genetically altered rice and giving them to the Chinese government. He was working for Ventria Biosciences in Junction City. That company is based in California.
The 160 acres owned by Syngenta are the only agricultural property owned by a foreign entity in Geary County, except for 25 acres owned by a man named Barry Southon, who is affiliated with the United Kingdom.
That's according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) database. It shows county-by-county information through the end of 2023, which is the most recent document available online. According to that, Riley and Pottawatomie counties have no farmland that is a foreign holding.
In Kansas, 1.3 million acres are foreign-held, which is 2.8% of all agricultural land. Much of that is wind farms, through companies in Canada and Italy.
According to the AFIDA data, since 2017, foreign holdings in the U.S. have increased by an average of nearly 2.6 million acres annually.
© 2025 The Manhattan Mercury, Kan.. Visit www.themercury.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.