"Foreign interests are buying up Minnesota" is a great applause line, and I'm not going to give it to you, because the numbers don't. What the numbers do support is more useful — and, frankly, more damning about how our own government does its job. So let's read the actual ledger.
I care about this for a plain reason. A state that doesn't know who owns it can't protect itself, and a state that exaggerates the threat can't be trusted when the threat is real. Both failures are avoidable. Both require the same thing: counting honestly.
The farmland number, deflated
Per the U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent report, foreign investors held 603,699 acres of Minnesota agricultural land as of the end of 2024 — 1.9 percent of the state's privately held farmland. That is below the national average of 3.6 percent, and well below neighbors like Michigan at 8.8 percent.
The "China is buying our food supply" version is smaller still. In all of Minnesota, Chinese-owned agricultural holdings total 442 acres — two parcels owned by a seed company, in Clay and Goodhue counties. The largest foreign holders here are, in order, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy. If you're picturing a foreign flag over the family farm, the flag is mostly the Union Jack, and it's over about one acre in fifty.
I'll give the honest caveat, because it cuts the other way: this data is self-reported. The federal disclosure regime relies on foreign owners filing their own paperwork, and government auditors have questioned its reliability. So the real number could be somewhat higher, and the trend is upward — Minnesota's foreign-held acreage rose about 47,000 acres over two years. The verifiable story isn't a takeover. It's a slow climb we're measuring with a leaky ruler.
The law we already have — and apparently never use
Here's where it gets interesting for a lawyer. Minnesota has restricted foreign ownership of farmland since 1977. It's on the books right now: Minn. Stat. § 500.221 generally bars foreign individuals and corporations from acquiring agricultural land, with exceptions, and it gives the commissioner of agriculture the power to investigate, subpoena, and go to district court to force divestiture.
I went looking for a single instance of that power ever being used. I couldn't find one. No reported Minnesota court decision enforces § 500.221. The Agriculture Department's own public materials on corporate farm ownership don't mention foreign-ownership enforcement at all. As best I can determine from the public record, we have had a law against this for nearly fifty years and no evidence that anyone has ever enforced it.
That is the real scandal, and it's a familiar one to anyone who's read this series: Minnesota is better at passing laws than at using them. The fine-print article found a plain-language statute with zero cases in 45 years. The wage-theft article found a felony charged twice in six years. Here's a farmland-ownership law that may never have been enforced in half a century. A law nobody enforces isn't protection. It's decoration.
The fix costs almost nothing: the same statute already requires the commissioner to make ownership reports public. Publish them. Then ask the Agriculture Department a question any citizen can ask — how many foreign-ownership reports are on file, and has a single enforcement action ever been opened? If the answer is what the public record suggests, that answer is itself the story, and the beginning of the fix.
The half-built steel mill that taught us what leverage looks like
If you want the fullest real case of foreign corporate ownership in Minnesota, it isn't a farm. It's a mine.
In 2008, the India-based conglomerate Essar broke ground near Nashwauk on the Iron Range for a taconite mine and what was billed as the region's first new steel mill. By 2016, after the state moved to terminate its mineral leases, the project collapsed into bankruptcy — leaving contractors owed tens of millions and the state of Minnesota owed roughly $66 million for infrastructure it had funded. Governor Walz later described it plainly: "a company that left the Iron Range in the lurch and caused a lot of pain."
Now the part the slogans miss. The story didn't end there, and it isn't a simple morality play. The successor company, ultimately back under the Essar umbrella, negotiated a repayment schedule with the state — about $70 million owed to Itasca County, of which the company says roughly $42 million has been repaid on schedule through 2024. And in July 2026, the project finally lit — a first production blast on a $2.5 billion facility, about 350 union jobs, the first new iron-ore mine to open in Minnesota in roughly fifty years, run by the same foreign conglomerate the state once tried to bar.
You can read that as vindication or as caution, and honestly it's both. But the verifiable throughline is the one worth taking to every other deal: it was the state's leverage — the leases, the clawback, the bar proceeding — that forced the repayment and the finish. Foreign ownership wasn't the problem or the solution. Public leverage, actually used, was. Which is exactly the tool § 500.221 hands the Agriculture Department on farmland and nobody picks up.
For the rest of the ledger, in the interest of completeness and without the drama: Canada's Enbridge owns the pipelines across northern Minnesota. The pork plants in St. James and Worthington are owned by China's WH Group (Smithfield) and Brazil's JBS respectively — and Smithfield paid Minnesota's largest child-labor penalty in the Labor Department's history, $2 million, over minors working hazardous night shifts. The NorthMet copper-nickel project is owned by a Swiss-and-Canadian venture. About 216,000 acres of Minnesota forest land is foreign-held — the largest single category, and the least discussed. None of that is a crisis. All of it is a ledger Minnesotans are entitled to read, kept current, in public.
States' rights is a toolbox, not a bumper sticker
The other half of the request I hear from Minnesotans is to protect the state from federal overreach. I believe in that — I said during the campaign that the states are where the people's power actually lives. But it only means something if you know what the tools are, so here they are, described accurately rather than shouted.
The federal government cannot commandeer Minnesota. It can regulate people and companies directly, but it cannot order our Legislature to pass its laws, cannot conscript our sheriffs to run its programs, and cannot force us to keep laws on our books we've chosen to repeal. That's the anti-commandeering doctrine — the same principle the Supreme Court used to free county sheriffs from a federal gun-law mandate in Printz v. United States and to let states repeal their own sports-betting bans in Murphy v. NCAA. It cuts across party lines by design, and it is exactly the ground on which a federal judge — a Republican appointee — dismissed the Justice Department's 2026 lawsuit against Minnesota's immigration policies, writing that the government's own theory "violate[d] the anti-commandeering doctrine."
Federal money can't be a gun to your head. Washington can attach conditions to the funds it sends, but the Supreme Court held in NFIB v. Sebelius that threatening a state with the loss of all its Medicaid money to coerce a policy change crossed the line into unconstitutional coercion. That doctrine is live right now: as this series' budget article noted, federal Medicaid administrators have deferred hundreds of millions in payments to Minnesota — most recently about $199 million — pending fraud reviews the state calls pressure. Deferrals aren't cuts, and I won't call them that. But the spending-clause line exists precisely so that "we'll withhold your funding until you obey" has a legal limit.
Minnesota's own constitution is a floor we can raise. State courts, deciding cases on independent state-constitutional grounds, are largely beyond federal second-guessing. Rights and protections we anchor in the Minnesota Constitution belong to Minnesotans in a way a shifting federal majority can't easily reach.
And states can act together. Interstate compacts and multistate coalitions are how states punch above their individual weight — the mechanism behind everything from the Great Lakes water-diversion ban to the coalitions of attorneys general. By one tally this spring, Democratic attorneys general had filed their hundredth suit against the current administration and won 55 of the 67 that had been decided. Minnesota's office has been an active part of that — and, to keep faith with this series' standard, that record deserves the same scrutiny as everything else: some of those suits protect Minnesotans, and some are position-taking, and voters are entitled to a public scorecard telling which is which.
What we can do
Enforce the law we already passed. Publish the foreign farmland-ownership reports § 500.221 already requires, and ask the Agriculture Department to account for fifty years of apparent non-enforcement. A dashboard of who owns Minnesota's land — updated yearly, searchable, honest about the data's limits — would do more than any new statute.
Use leverage, don't just wave flags. The Essar saga proved that leases, clawbacks, and enforcement actions are what actually protect Minnesota's interest. Build those conditions into every large deal — foreign or domestic — from the start, so the public isn't left holding a $66 million bag and hoping.
Treat states' rights as a working toolbox. The anti-commandeering doctrine, the spending-clause limit, independent state-constitutional grounds, and multistate action are real and available. A serious defense of Minnesota's sovereignty uses them precisely — not as applause lines, but as the specific instruments that made a Republican-appointed judge throw out a federal overreach suit this July.
And measure the threat honestly, in both directions. The person who tells you China is buying your farm when it owns 442 acres is not protecting Minnesota; they're spending your attention on a decoy while the forest land, the packing plants, and the unenforced statutes go unwatched. Minnesota deserves the real ledger, kept in public, and the will to act on it when the numbers actually warrant.
Who owns Minnesota? Mostly Minnesotans — and a slow, measurable, foreign minority we have every right to see clearly and every tool to manage. The failure isn't that we can't protect the state. It's that we keep passing the protections and then leaving them in the drawer.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
USDA Farm Service Agency, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land through December 31, 2024 (posted January 2026), read directly from the report PDF — Minnesota's 603,699 foreign-held acres (1.9 percent of privately held agricultural land), the national 3.6 percent average, the two-year change, the country-by-country breakdown led by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy, the 216,659 acres of foreign-held forest land, and the 442 acres of Chinese-held land (Syngenta Seeds parcels in Clay and Goodhue counties); the report's self-reported nature and acknowledged data-quality limits are noted. Minn. Stat. § 500.221 (the 1977 restriction on foreign ownership of agricultural land and the commissioner of agriculture's investigation and enforcement authority), verified against raw text at revisor.mn.gov; no reported Minnesota decision enforcing it and no public record of an enforcement action could be located (CourtListener and Minnesota Department of Agriculture public materials, searched Sept. 2026). National Agricultural Law Center, 2025 legislative recap on state foreign-ownership restrictions (roughly 28–29 states). Essar / Mesabi Metallics timeline from MPR News reporting by Dan Kraker (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019), including the $66 million state debt, the 2016 bankruptcy, and the 2019 DNR bar proceeding with Governor Walz's quotation; repayment figures ($70 million owed to Itasca County, roughly $42 million repaid through 2024) per Essar's own January 2025 statement, attributed as a company source; the July 2026 first production blast, $2.5 billion project, and ~350 union jobs per KAXE and Twin Cities Business (July–August 2026). Enbridge (Canada) Line 3 completion (Reuters, Sept. 2021). Smithfield/WH Group $2 million child-labor penalty — the largest in Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry history — and the underlying findings (Minnesota Reformer and Star Tribune, Nov. 14, 2024); JBS/Worthington labor context (MPR News, 2025). NewRange/NorthMet ownership by a Glencore–Teck venture (Star Tribune and Duluth News Tribune, 2023). Federal preemption items: the July 20, 2026 dismissal of the Justice Department's sanctuary suit against Minnesota, with the court's quoted anti-commandeering holding (Courthouse News and Pioneer Press); the HHS deferral of approximately $199 million in Minnesota Medicaid payments (HHS press release, July 21, 2026), cross-referenced to this series' budget article; and the multistate-litigation tally (Stateline, April 1, 2026 — 100 suits filed, 55 of 67 decided cases won). Consumer-protection context: Minnesota's August 2025 TikTok suit (CBS Minnesota and MPR News). The states'-rights doctrine summaries reference Printz v. United States, Murphy v. NCAA, New York v. United States, and NFIB v. Sebelius for standard, well-established propositions of constitutional law.
Case citations in the doctrine section state widely established holdings; before any of this language is used in a filing it would go through the firm's citation-verification process. Several recent developments are cited to news reporting by headline and date where full articles were behind paywalls, and are flagged as such. No documented Minnesota enforcement action against Temu or Shein exists as of publication; any such proposal is prospective, not a record. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.