Aroostook County, Maine • FIPS 23003 • FY2024 Expanded County Report
Land Is National Security. So Is Being Broke.
When 50.05% of a border county's foreign-reported farmland sits in one Canada-linked timber holder, both ownership transparency and economic continuity matter.
AFIDA WATCH Citizen Report 12 pages
265 records • 265 Parcel IDs • 24 Owner IDs
Template: citizen-report-expanded-v1.0.3
Source: afida_current_holdings_yr2024_clean.csv
County Reported Acres
2,085,917.39
Sum of Number of Acres from deterministic county rows
One Canada-linked Holder
1,044,228.82 acres
Owner ID 25669 ALLAGASH TIMBERLANDS LP — 137 filings / 137 Parcel IDs = 50.05%
Canada-linked Current Value
$319.20M
250 Canada-linked records: 249 positive / 1 zero / 0 blank — median $371k — not a verified holder penalty valuation
1. Land is national security
Policy timeline that makes Aroostook newsworthy:
• Feb 21, 2025 America First Investment Policy — directs action on foreign-adversary investment in farmland near sensitive facilities
• July 8, 2025 USDA National Farm Security Action Plan — explicitly connects agriculture, foreign land ownership and national security
• June 25, 2026 USDA proposed AFIDA rule would modernize reporting — proposal, distinguished from binding requirements under 7 CFR Part 781
Forest land is agricultural land under AFIDA 781.2(b) — timber counts.
Aroostook is Maine's northernmost county, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, on the Canadian border. FY2024 shows 2.08M acres of foreign-reported agricultural land — the exact scale these policies were written to make visible. This report covers Canada (AFIDA country/source code 124) as the detail country.
2. So is being broke
Economic continuity is a research question. The 137 reported parcels under one Owner ID represent more than 1 million acres. Could a disruption affect harvest schedules, mill supply, tax receipts, roads or employment? These AFIDA records do not measure those dependencies or effects; separate local economic and operational evidence is required. No disruption or violation by the named holder is established here. A late-filing civil penalty — modeled at 0.1% of interest value per week before discretionary reductions, up to 25% ceiling (781.4), with 90-day clock (781.3) — could be material where an obligation and a violation are established. The $319.20M figure below is aggregated reported Current Value for Canada-linked records, not the named holder alone. It is neither an independent appraisal nor a verified penalty valuation for ALLAGASH TIMBERLANDS LP. A penalty scenario requires the applicable fair market value of the foreign person’s interest and a confirmed reporting obligation. Counsel determines applicability and legal conclusions.
Canada-linked value fields — 250 records within the county’s 265 records (Citizen Report Page 11), not the named holder alone:
| Field | As Reported Total | Positive | Zero | Blank | Non-zero Median | Range |
|---|
| Purchase Price | $253.99M | 232 | 17 | 1 | $164,000 | $1,000 – $21,746,003 |
| Estimated Value | $3.91M | 18 | 217 | 15 | $199,906 | $1,000 – $617,000 |
| Current Value | $319.20M | 249 | 1 | 0 | $371,000 | $1,000 – $21,746,003 |
Totals describe reported source coverage only. No independent appraisal. Positive, reported-zero, and blank remain separate. Acquisition year from source field, not inferred. Report rows keyed as Report Year + Owner ID + Parcel ID.
3. What the data does not say
Interpretive boundary (from Citizen Report Page 12): This is public-record analysis of USDA AFIDA filings. Filings alone do not establish government control, wrongdoing, displacement or migration; those questions require separate evidence. Agricultural land and certain foreign investments receive national-security scrutiny; a foreign-linked filing alone does not establish a security threat or violation. Holder rollups use Owner ID, not owner-name spelling. Similar names remain separate and do not prove beneficial ownership across years.
Audit: All 265 downloaded CSV rows matched pinned source across 20 exported columns, no missing or additional rows, no duplicate county report keys, CSV acreage sum matched report headline, all 12 PDF pages rendered. Checks validate generated output, not accuracy of government submissions. Dataset SHA-256: 592664aaa9bb5328154b9d6f418ca212540b83e9b8a3855512c1c69261fb6fb2
4. Why this is a law-firm question
The county snapshot documents reported landholding concentration. It provides a starting point for questions about compliance and local economic continuity, not evidence of a security threat, operational dependence or a reporting violation. The AFIDA 90-day reporting clock is easy to miss when acquisition years are old and parcel lists are long. The record-to-report process — pin input with SHA-256, retain FIPS as 5-character string, deduplicate by Report Year + Owner ID + Parcel ID, reconcile country totals to county totals — gives counsel a traceable starting point for reviewing records and identifying what additional event, filing or valuation evidence is needed.