Bill Gates Set Up 20 Shell Companies to Hide Purchase of $113 Million of Nebraska Farmland, by Destiny Herbers

Originally published by Investigate Midwest.

Destiny Herbers, Flatwater Free Press, is a Roy W. Howard fellow through the Scripps Howard Foundation. She earned her master’s degree in journalism at the University of Maryland.

Flatwater Free Press reporter Yanqi Xu contributed to the data analysis used in this story. The series, “Who’s Buying Nebraska?” was made possible by a grant from the Center for Rural Strategies and Grist.

The limited liability companies, buried under layers of business names, overlapping employees and addresses in at least three states, form a network more tangled and opaque than the one created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is buying a giant amount of Nebraska ranch land.

A glance at federal records shows the series of Nebraska farms listed as foreign-owned, though there’s no country attached and no hint that these farms with unassuming names might be related.

Willowdale Farms, Merrick County Farms, Dove Haven Ranch, Champion Valley Farm, Schroder Family Farms and many more are concentrated in northeast Nebraska but spread to the southeast corner and west nearly to Wyoming.

In Nebraska’s business records, they have one similarity: Each farm’s office address leads to a single-story brick building in the St. Louis suburbs, an office park housing a dentist, lawyers and, until recently, a farmland investment startup called AgCoA. …