USDA digitises foreign farmland ownership reporting

The US Department of Agriculture has launched a new online portal for reporting foreign interests in US agricultural land, tightening the mechanics of compliance under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 (AFIDA) and pushing a process that has historically relied on county-office paperwork toward a centralised digital workflow.

The portal, available via Login.gov, collects the same information as the existing FSA-153 form. USDA said foreign persons covered by AFIDA can include businesses and governments, and the agency is positioning the portal as part of a broader enforcement and transparency drive under its National Farm Security Action Plan.

Secretary Brooke Rollins said, “The online portal will allow us to obtain verifiable information about foreign interests in American agricultural land and protect the security of our farmers.”

For food and ingredient supply chains, the change is procedural, but not trivial. Farmland ownership and long-term lease structures sit behind crop rotation decisions, on-farm capital investment, water strategy, and, in some regions, local planning politics. A cleaner reporting trail, and faster access to records, matters to processors and brand owners conducting diligence on upstream production assets, contract farming arrangements, or vertically integrated operations that blur the line between “farm” and “factory”.

AFIDA requires covered foreign persons to report qualifying transactions and holdings within set timelines, and the penalties for non-compliance can be material. The implementing regulations require reporting within 90 days of acquisition or transfer for reportable interests, and civil penalties can reach up to 25 percent of the fair market value of the foreign person’s interest in the land, depending on the nature of the violation.

USDA is also using the portal rollout to point stakeholders at its current rulemaking agenda. In late December 2025, the department published an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) seeking input on potential revisions to AFIDA reporting requirements, with comments due by 28 January 2026. The ANPRM frames the update as a response to increased national security attention on agricultural land holdings, and to criticisms of how AFIDA data has been collected, tracked, and shared.

Alongside the portal announcement, USDA said it had shared its annual AFIDA report for 2024 with Congress. The report puts foreign holdings of US agricultural land at 46 million acres as of 31 December 2024, and includes a section covering land held and acquired by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea in recent years.

For food businesses with exposure to farming assets, whether through direct land interests, joint ventures, or supply contracts linked to land control, the change increases the likelihood that ownership structures will be interrogated with more consistency — and with fewer excuses available for late, incomplete, or “lost in the system” reporting.