On June 30, 2021, the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment proposing limits on Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland and USDA farm subsidies for land already held by Chinese owners. The committee vote did not enact a federal ban. The measure was headed for a House floor vote, and later restrictions in House-passed appropriations proposals were left out of enacted appropriations, according to the Congressional Research Service.
What did the House panel propose?
Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington offered the amendment to the committee’s USDA-FDA funding bill. The committee approved it by voice vote on June 30, 2021. As reported by Successful Farming, the provision would have barred China from buying additional U.S. farmland and made land already in Chinese possession ineligible for USDA farm subsidies. At the time of the July 1, 2021 report, the funding bill was headed to the House floor.
That was a proposed restriction attached to an annual appropriations bill—not a permanent, stand-alone federal prohibition. Committee approval is one stage of the legislative process; it does not by itself make a proposal law.
Why did lawmakers support or oppose it?
Newhouse’s national-security and food-supply argument
Newhouse said Chinese investors owned nearly 192,000 acres of U.S. farmland, according to the July 1, 2021 account. He argued that the trend posed a national-security risk and framed restricting purchases and farm-program eligibility as a way to protect an independent U.S. food supply chain. These were his stated rationales, not findings established by the committee vote.
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The article attributed this statement to Newhouse: “The current trend in the United States is leading us toward the creation of a Chinese-owned agricultural land monopoly.”
Meng’s concern about singling out China
Rep. Grace Meng of New York objected to targeting China alone. She warned that doing so could affect Asian Americans and suggested that legislation address all adversaries. The report described bipartisan support for the amendment alongside Meng’s objection; those facts are not mutually exclusive.
The article attributed this question to Meng: “Can we honestly say that this amendment, which singles out one country, won’t have repercussions on Asian-Americans across our country?”
Did the 2021 amendment become law?
The committee’s approval was not enactment. The Congressional Research Service’s December 2025 report says House-passed FY2022 and FY2023 appropriations measures included proposed restrictions on agricultural-land purchases by companies owned wholly or partly by China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. Those restrictions were not included in enacted appropriations. Instead, the enacted FY2023 provision expanded USDA data access and transparency. See the CRS report on foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land.
The documented legislative history here reaches the CRS report’s December 2025 publication. It does not establish what federal or state restrictions may have changed after that date, so it should not be read as a complete statement of current law.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How large was the reported landholding?
The nearly 192,000-acre figure was attributed to Newhouse in the July 1, 2021 Successful Farming account; it is not a current estimate. For scale, USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service estimated that the United States had 896.6 million acres of land in farms in 2020, in a report published in February 2021. That is total farmland, not foreign-owned land. The two figures describe different things and should not be treated as a direct, like-for-like ownership comparison.
The USDA estimate appears in the 2021 Census of Agriculture overview.
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