The Federal Reserve printed trillions. Land values soared. But foreign-held farmland records filed with USDA still show $0.
The Dollar Lost 87% Since 1972 — Why Aren't AFIDA Land Valuations Keeping Up?
There is a number that should concern every policymaker, regulator, and citizen who cares about transparency in foreign land ownership: $0 .
Not the price of a distressed parcel in a depressed county. Not an error on a single filing. We are talking about 467,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land — held by 538 source Owner IDs across 48 countries — with both Estimated Value and Current Value recorded as zero in the reviewed subset. This is not the same as a zero Purchase Price. Many of these records have sat unchanged for 14 years or more. Meanwhile, the dollar that was supposed to be measuring that land has lost 87% of its purchasing power since 1972.
That is not a coincidence worth ignoring. It is a policy gap worth examining.
Editorial clarification · October 24, 2026: The purchasing-power comparison has been corrected and the zero-value subset distinguished from Purchase Price. Snapshot recurrence does not independently establish uninterrupted ownership.
Using the article’s approximate 87% purchasing-power decline, a dollar today buys about what $0.13 bought in 1972; a 1972 dollar bought more, not less. The percentage requires specified CPI months and should not be treated as a live inflation reading. That is not a rounding error. That is an 87% erosion of value — the result of sustained, compounding inflation averaging 2–4% annually over 54 years.
The mechanism is well-understood: when the money supply expands faster than the productive output of the economy, each unit of currency purchases less. The process is gradual enough to evade public alarm in any given year, but dramatic enough to rewrite the economic landscape across generations.
No single inflation event caused this. The dollar didn't collapse overnight. It was eroded systematically — through policy decisions, through crisis responses, through the slow normalization of expansion as a governing tool.
The numbers are not in dispute.
The M2 money supply — the broadest commonly cited measure of dollars in circulation — stood at approximately $800 billion in 1972 . It now exceeds $21 trillion .
Two periods of acceleration stand out:
The Federal Reserve does not dispute these figures. The debate, such as it is, concerns the consequences — which asset classes absorbed that liquidity, and whether the resulting price appreciation reflects real value creation or nominal repricing.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average moved from approximately 1,000 in 1972 to over 40,000 today . That looks like a 40x gain.
But measure that gain against the dollar's actual purchasing power, and a meaningful portion of it disappears — not because the businesses aren't real, but because you are counting in a currency worth far less than it was.
This is not a fringe critique. Economists call it the difference between nominal and real returns. Markets account for this automatically — equities reprice continuously, every second of every trading day, absorbing new information about inflation, monetary policy, and asset value in real time.
The lesson here is not that the stock market is fraudulent. The lesson is that asset prices denominated in depreciating currency require continuous repricing mechanisms to remain accurate .
The stock market has one. Real estate transactions have one — every sale resets the record at current market value.
AFIDA does not.
The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requires foreign nationals and entities to report acquisitions and transfers of U.S. agricultural land to the USDA. The system was designed as a disclosure and monitoring tool — and at the moment of acquisition, it can work as intended.
The valuation question begins with field definitions. AFIDA reports more than acquisitions, including specified transfers and status changes; this ledger should not be treated as a periodically updated market appraisal.
Once a parcel is filed, the reported transaction value is frozen at the time of original disclosure. A filing-time value is not an automatic market update. This review does not establish whether any particular holding was updated or whether other valuation evidence is available.
The result is a database with hundreds of records showing $0 valuations — some filed as recently as the last decade, others dating back 14+ years — while the land underneath those filings has, in all likelihood, appreciated substantially in a market driven in part by the same monetary expansion that eroded the dollar.
Consider the data:
This is not a data anomaly. It is a systemic feature of a 47-year-old disclosure law that was written before the era of multi-trillion-dollar quantitative easing.
The Federal Reserve's monetary expansion was a deliberate policy choice. One can debate its necessity and its consequences, but its effects on real asset prices are not seriously in dispute: more dollars chasing a finite supply of land produces higher nominal land prices . This has been observed in residential real estate, commercial real estate, farmland, and timberland across every region of the country.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is monetary economics.
The legitimate policy question — one that does not require any particular view of the Federal Reserve — is this:
If every other asset class has automatic repricing mechanisms that account for monetary expansion, why does the federal disclosure system for foreign-held agricultural land have none?
The Dow reprices every second. A farmland sale resets the record at closing. But AFIDA records from 2010 — denominated in 2010 dollars, if denominated at all — are still sitting in the USDA database in 2026, unchanged, as the dollar that was supposed to measure them has continued to lose value.
Should AFIDA require periodic revaluation of foreign-held parcels? Should zero-value filings trigger automatic USDA review after a defined holding period? Should significant monetary expansion events — like the $5 trillion COVID response — serve as a mandatory review trigger for disclosure databases built on nominal valuations?
These are not radical proposals. They are the kinds of accountability mechanisms that any serious disclosure system should already have.
The gap between printed dollars and reported land values widens every year without intervention. At some point, the disclosure becomes indistinguishable from no disclosure at all.
Questioning Federal Reserve policy is legitimate when the data supports the question — and here, the data does.
This is not an argument that the Fed acted maliciously, or that monetary expansion is inherently wrong. It is an argument that policy decisions have downstream consequences across every asset class , and that the federal systems designed to monitor those asset classes should be built to account for those consequences.
AFIDA was not designed with quantitative easing in mind. It was not designed for a world where the money supply could expand by $5 trillion in 18 months. Updating it for that world is not ideological — it is administrative common sense.
County-level AFIDA reports — including parcel-level data on zero-value filings, foreign owner concentrations, and multi-year ownership patterns — are now available for download at afidawatch.com.
If you work in agricultural policy, land use regulation, national security oversight, or financial transparency, the data is worth your time.
The disclosure system exists for a reason. It should be accurate enough to serve that reason.
Oran Jackson is the Founder of AFIDA Watch, a data transparency initiative focused on foreign agricultural land ownership disclosures under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act.
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