Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the biggest farmland owner in US
The world s fourth richest person owns the massive land resources either directly or through third-party entities by his personal investment vehicle. The Gates have maximum holdings of 69,071 acres in the state of Louisiana. (Image: Reuters)
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Updated: Jan 15, 2021, 12:56 PM IST
The co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is not only proficient in the world of software and technology. It was recently revealed that Gates is also the biggest farmland owner in the United States, with a portfolio across 18 states of the country.
As per the Land Report, Bill Gates had accumulated as much as 2,42,000 acres in land acreage. Along with his wife, Melinda Gates, he has an ownership of 2,68,984 acres of land. Most of his portfolio consists of farmland and it also includes 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land.
Unmaking California’s Central Valley
Mark Arax
IN THIS YEAR of heat records and fire tornadoes, California faces another potential crisis: drought. In November 2020, more than 80 percent of the state’s land mass was classified as somewhere between “abnormally dry” and “extreme drought” by the United States Drought Monitor. The chances of the winter offering relief look slim, given what’s called a “La Niña climate pattern,” which is associated with arid conditions in much of California. The months ahead are, in general, far more likely to bring water worries than happy surprises.
To longtime California residents, such fears are familiar. The state’s most recent drought began in 2012 and stretched into the early days of the Trump administration. Minds not entirely fogged by 2020 may recall the choreographed spectacle in April 2015 when then-Governor Jerry Brown stood on a snowless mountaintop to announce the state’s first-ever mandatory urban water conservatio
By BRENT CRANE | Bloomberg | Published: December 19, 2020 John Conaway has lived in and around the town of Ridgecrest since before it was much of a town. In 1967, when he moved his young family to the remote Southern California community, Ridgecrest had been incorporated for only a few years. It was all dirt roads, he says. No stop signs, no nothing. Mostly, the town was there to support the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, an arms-testing base built nearby during World War II. The military contractor Grumman, which employed Conaway as an engineer, had given him a bonus to relocate from New York. Like many of his colleagues and their families, he and his lived on base.
Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times
Published: 17 Dec 2020 08:23 PM BdST
Updated: 17 Dec 2020 08:23 PM BdST Outside Prairie View A&M University s student center in Prairie View, Texas, Oct. 30, 2018. MacKenzie Scott, the world’s 18th-richest person, recently donated $50 million to Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas. (Todd Spoth/The New York Times)
They came like gifts from a Secret Santa, $20 million here, $40 million there, all to higher education, but not to the elite universities that usually hog all the attention. These donations went to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of and that tended to serve regional, minority and lower-income students.