The Corporation and the DNA of Farmland Financialization

Abstract

Although farmland has long been understood to be an investment, policies shaping the economy, intensified by the 2007-2008 food crisis, have given rise to a new paradigm in which, for a set of major investors, farmland is considered more of a financial asset than a productive one. This thesis proposes an innovative archival methodology to observe the financialization of farmland. Studying McDonough and Fulton Counties, Illinois, I demonstrate how ownership records derived from Nexis Public Records compare with tax parcel data. I find that the multilayered subsidiary form serves as a marker for farmland financialization. Based on these findings, I propose a new definition of farmland financialization that accounts for the role of the corporation. I also perform a case study of the largest publicly traded farmland REIT in the U.S. and use neo-Polanyian and Granovetterian theory to observe the role of financial ties in the farmland financialization process