Microsoft founder Bill Gates cares a lot. At least that’s what he wants you to think.
Despite being one of the richest men in the world, he chooses to spend his time studying climate change, funding vaccines, visiting poor countries to look for solutions and helping the world move toward a “sustainable” future.
Gates has been a busy beaver. His new book just dropped all about climate change, entitled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need.
This guy just can’t stop helping and enlightening the world, it would seem.
In addition the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a large stake in the funding for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen, Norway.
Now news comes that Gates is now also buying up huge amounts of the world’s farmland.
Maybe he’s just interested in a new career path?
Meet Farmer Bill
The sign that Gates was accelerating his purchase of farmland came last year when Eric O’Keefe, publisher of a magazine called the Land Report, looked into who had bought a large 14,500 acre slice of farmland in fertile eastern Washington State.
It was hard to find out, since it was linked to a small holding company, but after digging around they found it was linked to Cascade Investment: a large fund acting on behalf of Bill Gates.
Gates has been buying farmland for years across the United States from California to Louisiana, so O’Keefe wasn’t completely taken by surprise, but he still found it noteworthy. Indeed, with his Washington state purchase, Gates’ agricultural land now racks up at around 242,000 acres altogether. That’s some serious growing power.
As the news broke people asked the obvious question: why is Gates buying up farmland? The general consensus was that he’s just such a good guy focused on climate change that he wants to help steer the future of agriculture. As Newsweek put it, Gates is a “sustainable agriculture champion.”
With a press like that who needs propaganda?
The fact that Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland, telling us what to eat, predicting the next pandemics, and the fact that the media keeps promoting him like he's some type of hero should alarm us all.
— chrisexcel102 (@chrisexcel103) February 25, 2021
What’s Really Going On?
In addition to the 242,000 acres of agricultural land, Gates owns a lot of other holdings and properties too. He’s the biggest owner of farmland in America. In 2017 when Gates bought land on the outskirts of Phoenix it emerged that he was working to design and build a futuristic city and farm hybrid using “autonomous logistics hubs” and testing out high-tech ideas for farming and living.
This is entirely possible, since Gates is obsessed with climate change, sustainability, bioengineering and technology. His recent book, for example, advises everyone to switch from meat to soy burgers. You can grow a lot of soy on 242,000 acres.
O’Keefe believes it is more people managing Gates’ assets making the buys on his behalf, including Michael Larson who manages the Cascade fund that’s been buying up a lot of the farmland. The thing here is that no matter how rich he may be, Gates is clearly a hands-on guy.
Does anyone truly believe he’s letting his funds run wild and buy things which he doesn’t approve of or care about? There’s obviously a reason – or various reasons – that Bill Gates wants to get his paws on prime farmland.
As the Biden Administration works to push America into the new green economy (no matter the cost in jobs and unemployment), people like Gates are in a prime position to help push forward the agenda together with him. Gates has already been a big investor in products like Beyond Meat and trying to change how Americans eat and live.
When you start connecting the dots it becomes a lot less mysterious why Farmer Bill is so interested in buying up land. If you want to control what people eat you need to control the food that’s grown.
