Who owns the most land in the United States?

Who is America’s largest landowner? This question is the quest of the Land Report 100 Research Team all year long.

In 2024, America’s largest landowner is Red Emmerson. Red and his family own just over 2.4 million acres in California, Oregon, and Washington through their timber-products company, Sierra Pacific Industries. The Emmersons became America’s largest landowners in 2021 when they acquired 175,000 acres in Oregon from Seneca Timber Company. With that acquisition, the Emmersons surpassed Liberty Media chairman John Malone’s 2.2 million acres. CNN founder Ted Turner is America’s third largest landowner with 2 million acres in the Southeast, on the Great Plains, and across the West.

The Land Report 100 research team analyzes transactions and scours records to determine America’s leading landowners. That’s how we broke the news in 2020 that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was America’s largest farmland owner with more than 260,000 acres. We used the same methodology when we identified Shanda Investment Group founder Tianqiao Chen as the owner of almost 200,000 acres of Oregon timberland in 2024.

2. John Malone: 2.2 million acres

One of the enduring commitments of The Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation is the Perennial Agriculture Project, a joint project between the Foundation and The Land Institute.

Since its founding in 1976, The Land Institute has been dedicated to science-based research and developing food production methods that sustain the land and the soil. The Perennial Agriculture Project, led by a team of plant breeders and ecologists in multiple partnerships worldwide, is a paradigm shift that focuses on developing perennial grains, pulses, and oilseed-bearing plants to be grown in ecologically intensified, diverse crop mixtures known as perennial polycultures. Such a production system mimics the benefits found in native and natural ecosystems.

Unlike annuals that require farmers to kill and suppress weeds and other vegetation that would compete with crops for sunlight, nutrients, and water, perennial plants do not have to be reseeded or replanted each year. Additionally, these crops protect against soil erosion, and improve the overall soil structure providing the ecosystem with nutrient rich soil, carbon sequestration, and according to The Land Institute, can contribute to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Kernza is one example of a domesticated perennial grain. This distant cousin of annual wheat originates from a forage grass called intermediate wheatgrass (thinopyrum intermedium). Kernza perennial grain is in the early stages of crop stewardship to move the grain from research at The Land Institute onto farms and plates.

10. King Ranch: 911,215 acres

King Ranch has long been known as an innovator. In 1940, USDA recognized the ranch’s Santa Gertrudis as the first beef breed to be developed in the U.S. This legacy of innovation continues to this day.

In August 2023, the Department of Energy announced that the Birthplace of American Ranching was selected as the site of its South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub. The Energy Department selected 1PointFive, a wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental, to receive a grant to develop the hub on King Ranch. Direct air capture is a process that separates CO2 from the air and thus helps to reduce legacy CO2 in the atmosphere. Such a process is in keeping with the tradition of land stewardship on King Ranch that dates back 170 years to Captain Richard King himself.

Cotton and milo crops are evenly divided across approximately 60,000 acres of King Ranch’s land in south Texas. Dating back to the Civil War, King Ranch pioneered cotton cultivation and processing in south Texas. European markets imported thousands of bales via the Rio Grande and Mexico from Captain King. Today, not only is King Ranch one of the largest cotton producers in the U.S., but it also gins its own cotton in a modern, state-of-the-art ginning facility located on the Laureles Division of the ranch.

Expanding into Florida in 1961, King Ranch owns some 20,000 acres that have been converted entirely to farming activities within the Everglades Agricultural Area. Characterized by abundant rainfall, mild winters, and highly organic soils, King Ranch produces sugar cane, sod, sweet corn, green beans, and specialty lettuce on their Florida land. King Ranch is also known as the largest orange juice producer in the U.S. and provides an ongoing commitment to growing quality rangeland grasses in Florida and Texas.

18. Westervelt Heirs: 566,000 acres

It is not often that a land purchase involves working with a traditional knowledge keeper of a Native American Nation, but that was the situation for officials with Westervelt Ecological Services (WES) — an environmental restoration and conservation arm of The Westervelt Company — during the recent purchase of 109 acres situated along the Missouri River in northern Nebraska.

WES specializes in compensatory wetland, stream, and species mitigation. The Westervelt Company established WES in 2006 with a southeastern office in Alabama, a western office in California, and a Rocky Mountain office in Colorado. In early 2023, Montreal, Canada-based CDPQ invested in WES, with a goal to jointly achieve ambitious sustainability goals. In 2021, members of the WES Rocky Mountain regional office met with the Nebraska Department of Transportation about providing mitigation solutions for a widening-and-improvement project for flood-prone Highway 12.

“With the new road design, there are going to be unavoidable impacts to wetlands, and they need to be mitigated in some way,” says Will Duggins, business development manager for the WES Rocky Mountain region. “Much of the area within the Missouri River flood plain is already high-functioning or protected wetlands, and these are not ideal candidates for wetland-mitigation projects. We have to demonstrate that we are improving the function and value of the wetlands being utilized for mitigation. This is typically done by taking low-functioning wetlands and re-establishing, enhancing, or rehabilitating wetlands within a site. And then there are all these bluffs just off the Missouri River where you can’t create a wetlands project. So, we really had to search the area to figure out where to put the project.”

Once WES identified an appropriate area, officials met with approximately a dozen landowners before finding a family that was interested in selling. The purchase closed in October, and the road project is scheduled to begin in 2025. But before any of that could take place, regulatory and permitting requirements mandated that the Ponca Nation, which originally was displaced from the area in 1877, review and provide feedback on the project.

WES officials began working with Stacy Laravie, a Ponca Nation member and traditional knowledge keeper. “We had to get buy-in from the Nation. They were such an important party to this whole process because this is part of their landscape,” says WES Rocky Mountain Regional Director and Project Manager Tyler Bell. “We consulted with Laravie in understanding how and where to incorporate traditional and tribal plants of importance and in designing areas of the site to ensure safe and sustained access for Ponca Nation members for foraging and collection of wild plants for consumption and use.”

21. Stefan Soloviev: 535,000 acres

In 2023, Stefan Soloviev purchased the LE Ranch from longtime Land Report 100er D.K. Boyd, adding 106,000 acres to his holdings in New Mexico. Large renewable-power companies, including Engie, Enel, Invenergy, NextEra, and Orsted, hold leases on approximately half of Soloviev’s western lands for utility-scale wind and solar-power development. He expects to host 500 wind turbines by the end of the decade.

The planning and construction of three new long-distance transmission lines across his territory has accelerated this renewable development: the Grain Belt Express by Invenergy to Chicago, Colorado’s Power Pathway by Xcel to Denver, and the SunZia Southwest Transmission Project by Pattern to California. In effect, Soloviev has become a farmer of electrons (and grain). He views renewable sources of energy and food as the ultimate form of sustainability.

Also in 2023, Soloviev closed on the purchase of the San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad, which he bought out of bankruptcy. The 150-mile line, which he renamed the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande Railroad, dates back to the 1870s. It joins the Colorado Pacific Railroad as Soloviev’s second short-line railroad in the Centennial State. While the original purpose of the rail line was to tap newly discovered silver and gold mines in the San Juan Mountains, the San Luis Valley now produces a different kind of gold: It’s the second-largest potato-producing territory in America. The rich farmland also provides barley to the Molson Coors brewery in Golden. All of the barley is shipped by rail on the Colorado Pacific Rio Grande Railroad. Potato and timber traffic on the railroad had shifted to highway trucking during the bankruptcy of the railroad’s previous owner, Iowa Pacific Holdings. Efforts are underway to restore the viability of rail shipping as a competitive option.