Bill Gates’ interests are quietly moving from server farms to soil farms.
No one knows why except Bill and Melinda Gates and their inner circle, but the speculation is turning again to their vision of building new ‘connected’ smart cities and farms. This is where artificial intelligence (AI), geodata, resource management and other tech come together at 5G speeds to optimize crop yields from every acre of land, ushering in a new era of hyper AgTech.
Despite scarce information, a January 2020 press release from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation stated that it is “in the process of creating a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations, LLC,” adding that “the entity, to be known as Gates Ag One, aims to speed up efforts to provide smallholder farmers in developing countries, many of whom are women, with access to the affordable tools and innovations they need to sustainably improve crop productivity and adapt to the effects of climate change.”
Gates’ vast new U.S. land acquisitions were revealed through some investigative journalism by The Land Report, a go-to source on land ownership. Editor Eric O’Keefe noticed a massive purchase (14,500 acres) of prime farmland in Washington State made by an unknown Louisiana-based LLC with two just employees. The small LLC had $171 million at its disposal to make this land purchase.
O’Keefe investigated this “$171 million acquisition by an LLC with two employees in a metal-sided building down a dirt road off the Bayou Teche.” He dug deeper, and in so doing found Cascade Investment LLC, the investment firm that manages the Gates fortune.
Why is one of the proto billionaires of the internet age now getting his hands dirty, so to speak? The answer may be found in a patch of Arizona desert rather than a Pacific Northwest valley.
Farmer Bill’s Smart City In The Desert
Talk of Gates buying land for smart cities goes back to at least 2017, when the Microsoft founder and world’s third wealthiest person spent a reported $80 million for almost 25,000 acres near Phoenix, through real estate investment trust (REIT) Belmont Partners.
When (and if) it’s built, the envisioned smart city of Belmont will be about the size of Tempe.
While Cascade Investment LLC and Gates were mum on specifics, Belmont Partners said at the time that “the new investment will help Belmont become a template for the development of a sustainable city capitalizing on cutting-edge infrastructure.”
That statement said, “Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs.”
That’s the dream, anyway. An exhaustive February 2021 article in The New York Post identifies Gates as the nation’s single largest owner of farmland through a tangle of subsidiaries ultimately owned or retained by Cascade Investment LLC, noting that “with the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio … Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.”
As for what Gates imagines sitting on his Arizona land parcel, Digital Trends reported then that “the smart city’s cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and modes of distribution could involve large-scale 3D printing, a technology Gates has supported in the past. With plans for autonomous vehicles, the city could be one of the cities Gates says will experiment with the technology before it is offered to the broader public.”
Coming Soon: The Purpose-Built City
In an update on the situation that published one year ago this week, just as COVID was emerging, GlobeSt.com reported that Belmont acquired additional land in the proximal area known as Buckeye. “The location is ideal for a smart city experiment,” GlobeSt.com wrote.
“In addition to the phenomenal growth that Phoenix is experiencing, Buckeye is also seeing a surge in growth that will help support a smart city.”
Per the Belmont Properties statement, Futurism reported that the land “will transform a raw, blank slate into a purpose-built edge city built around a flexible infrastructure model.”
Commenting on the undeveloped nature of the land, Futurism added that “this lack of existing structure will allow the ‘smart city’ to be molded into a completely unique space. Belmont has the potential to drive design and ingenuity forward, all while supporting the state.”
As of today, a smattering of builders is erecting new homes in the vicinity of the proposed site of the smart city of Belmont, Arizona, but there’s been no large-scale development as yet.
Of course, the possibility exists that much of this land buying is just an investment — what the ultra-rich do, because, as the old saying about land goes, “they’re not making any more of it.”
And what about farming? As the New York Post reported, “Gates has invested in Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, two companies producing beef substitutes, including the Impossible Burger. In his new book, ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,’ Gates explains why raising beef cattle causes more harmful emissions than other forms of agriculture. He hopes plant-based substitutes will allow us to ‘cut down on meat-eating while still enjoying the taste of meat.’”