The headline is provocative, as some amount of corporate-owned farmland is owned by corporations that are in turn owned by farmers and their families.

I would also push back on the notion that owner-operators are in a better position. It's more accurate to say that farmers who have assets of any kind are better off than those who don't have assets. As an example, generations back in my family we owned a lot of farmland. There were some bad investments made in the farming operation and we almost lost it all. This was in the early 1980s for those who are familiar.

If my grandfather had sold all of his land and equipment in the late 1970s and invested it in the recently-started Vanguard group, rather than re-investing in the farming operation, then my family would be wealthy. Now expecting a farmer to know about index investing and to bet on it when it was just starting is unreasonable. But it's a good lesson in diversification.

When people lionize farming owner-operators, they discount the risk that owner is taking by having so many assets concentrated in one operation. Now farmers do know about investing and diversification, and some do make the rational decision to cash out. Many also don't, for various reasons.

But it's not totally fair to expect farmers to behave differently than other asset owners because farming is seen romantically or in terms of national security.

This is a different argument than one which would decry the position of tenant farmers. Obviously being a tenant farmer owning nothing but equipment is harder than being a farmer who has $5 million invested somewhere else and rents the land he farms.

Yeah. I think it's important to think about whether or not you want millions of dollars of assets tied up in land that you can farm. For example, I don't know how to farm, and I don't wish my 401(k) was land and structures... I am happy to have higher exposure to the wider economy.

Obviously there are recessions and having your own vegetable farm and place to live is nice... but most of the time there isn't a cataclysmic recession, so you're leaving money on the table. Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to have a bad year farming. Weather. Pests. Having a lot of assets doesn't help you when they're not liquid and plants won't grow for a year.