I believe that Jeff Bezos owns more.
He does. The Wal-Mart heirs own more, the guy that invented mass-produced French fries own more. If we expand the definition of "farmland" to include beef ranches and citrus, Gates drops to the middle of the pack (of the top 100).
I don't think it's really scary- at least not because of Bill Gates. He's a cog in a much bigger wheel, going back much farther.
If you're eating corn or soy or beet-derived sugar in the US you're, almost certainly eating GMO foods. If you're eating beef, pork, chicken- basically any meat purchased from your local chain grocery store (including a lot of farmed seafood), those animals were fed GMO foods. Bill Gates could plant every acre wall-to-wall with GMO crops and it'd be a drop in the bucket, because everyone's already doing it anyway.
The large-scale farms (which are typically corporate affairs anyway) don't have a choice- there's only a small handful of seed dealers, the seed's already treated with whatever proprietary pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other chemicals the seed company chooses- and they're not interested in letting farmers know what
exactly they're putting into the ground. That ignorance is generally passed on to the consumer.
Most of the big farms with the new machinery are using some pretty sophisticated software, hardware, GPS, etc. You can plot out what parts of which fields are most productive, you can deliver precise amounts of fertilizer to different portions of a field based on soil type. Most all that stuff runs, some way or another, on Windows. Bill Gates wouldn't need to own an acre of land to disrupt those big, corporate farms. He'd just need to flip a switch.
The big scary thing Bill Gates represents isn't exclusive to Bill Gates. Productive farmland is a finite resource, it's a commodity, like anything else. And when farm prices get up to $10,000 or $15,000 an acre, you or I can't go to the bank and get a loan to start up a new farm. And if you already have 500 acres, but need 1000 to get into the black...you can roll the dice with a bank loan just to break even, or you can sell to Bill Gates (or any other corporate farmer) for considerable profit. The exorbitant farm prices prevent young farmers from taking on the task, they prevent small established farms from growing, they push small operators onto less productive land, and they consolidate most of the commodity crops (corn, soy, pigs, beef) into a handful of international conglomerates.
You wind up going back to tenant farmers and feudal landlords. THAT'S the scary part, and it's way beyond Bill Gates.
