USDA Survey Shows Most U.S. Farmland Is Owned by Older, Non-Operating Landlords

US farm aid is the equivalent of Section 8 housing subsidies but for wealthy land owners versus the disadvantaged needing housing. From the report, 87% of 348 million acres of farmland held by 2.1 million landlords was not farmed by the owners.

"The average principal landlord is 69 years old, and landlords age 75 and older control about 40% of rented acres and rental income." is also an interesting fact in concert with "there are more farmers over 75 than under 35" per the USDA. That's ~139 million acres controlled by the 75+ cohort, and ~$13.64B in annual rental income.

(tangentially, if you replaced all of the US farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon [~61.6M acres], harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have ~5-12x more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this equates to roughly 7TW–12TW of solar PV capacity, and is far more efficient than harvesting row crops for biofuels)