H.R. 1629: Public Safety and Wildlife Protection Act

The Farmland Security Act of 2025 is built around a simple idea: if foreign interests own or lease U.S. agricultural land, the federal government wants clearer, more enforceable disclosure. The bill especially targets foreign-owned shell corporations, which it defines broadly as any corporation, company, association, firm, partnership, society, joint stock company, trust, estate, or other legal entity that has no or only nominal operations. That definition matters because it captures entities that may exist mostly on paper.

The toughest change is the new civil penalty. If a foreign-owned shell corporation violates the disclosure rules, it can be fined 100 percent of the fair market value of its interest in the agricultural land involved, measured on the date the penalty is assessed. That is effectively a full-value penalty. There is one off-ramp: if the shell corporation fixes a defective filing or files what it should have filed within 60 days after receiving notice from the Secretary of Agriculture, it avoids that civil penalty.

The bill also tries to move enforcement from reactive to routine. The Secretary of Agriculture would have to conduct an annual compliance audit covering at least 10 percent of reports submitted under section 2 of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978. The Secretary may also consult with heads of other federal agencies during those audits. On top of that, the Secretary must provide annual training to State and county-level personnel so they can identify agricultural land for which a required report by a foreign person was never submitted.

Congress is also demanding better data, not just better punishment. The first report to Congress would be due no later than 180 days after enactment, with reports every year after that. Those reports must cover foreign leasing of U.S. agricultural land, including effects on family farms, rural communities, and the domestic food supply; trends in purchases by foreign-owned shell corporations; and foreign ownership of agricultural production capacity and foreign participation in U.S. agricultural economic activity in the United States. To carry this out, the bill authorizes $2,000,000 for each fiscal year from 2025 through 2030.