U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and other lawmakers are pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to modernize the process for disclosing foreign land ownership.
This comes after the U.S. House recently rejected a Senate plan to ban countries such as China and North Korea from owning American farms. That plan was titled the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security Act.
The act would also have banned big investors from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from buying any food businesses.
The U.S. has a nationwide system that tracks foreign investors in agricultural land, requiring reports to be filed under the Farm Service Agency.
The current system involves re-typed, paper-filed reports, which Brown called outdated.
"We're in a technological world where this should be simpler, not harder," he said.
Brown and other U.S. senators recently signed a letter claiming that alleged inaccuracies in that publicly posted information reflects poorly on the FSA.
"Our job is to stand up for Ohio farmers, for Ohio agriculture, for Ohio consumers and for Ohio national security," Brown said. "And all of that can be compromised if we don't do this right."
Having accurate data on farmland is important to making policy decisions, said Jack Irvin, vice president of public policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau.
“That's part of what Senator Brown's trying to get with this bill here, is to make sure that we have the most up to date and accurate information," he said. "So as we're having conversations about foreign ownership and policies, either in states like Ohio or across the country, that we know the best information that we can.”
According to Irvin, Ohio doesn’t allow adversarial countries to own farmland. The farmland ownership ban in Ohio covers countries that are on the "adversarial list."
"It's, what we call the adversarial list. So countries like China, North Korea, Iran, etcetera, are prohibited from owning agricultural land here in Ohio now," he said.
Brown said he will continue to push for more restrictions on foreign farmland ownership to support national security.
“I don't want anybody that could compromise our national security to have access to land, to data, to manufacturing, to anything that could threaten us national security in our way of life,” he said.
