DutchInNZ
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With his 270,000 acres he is just a small player.
You think that Bill Gates owns a lot of land?
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ruffdog
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Interesting.......
DarkBlack
Elite Member
Then of course, the article has to get into a white, black skin color dissertation.
Written by a woke computer bot?
Racenut
Gold Member
Emmersons/Sierra Pacific Industries #1, last I heard the Mormon Church is a close #2 in the US. Catholic church is #1 in the world.
jyoutz
Super Member
SPI is definitely first in land ownership. I know that Ted Turner owns over 1 million acres between 3 ranches in New Mexico. He also own large ranches in Montana. Not sure where he ranks in term of acres owned in the U.S.
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DutchInNZ
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Hey, I am not an American, not used to such things. A European with more than 250 acres on his name puts him into the upper league.
paulsharvey
Elite Member
I was going to bring uo the CoLDS in the foreign land owners thread, but didn't known if I wanted to go there. Yes, LDS is the 2nd largest land owner in the US, and I don't know about what they own outside the US. I dont have an issue with Mormons, and if you play with On-X or Basemap or Landglide, you will often see the catholic church, or southern Baptist convention has a lot of pretty nice sized pieces of land. Dont know what some of them do; but the Mormons are a huge cattle operation; google Desserette Ranch.
I think a lot of the Southern Baptist Comvention land is willed to them, and just from what I can see on aerials/appraiser, it doesn't look like a lot of it is actively managed. I know in some of Europe, the catholic church often has ownership of the land private homes are on, and you basically do a 100 year lease of the land from the church?
quicksandfarmer
Elite Member
A book I highly recommend is "The Weirdest People in the World," by Joseph Henrich. He attempts to explain the rise of western civilization, I'll do my best to summarize the story he tells:
Until the arrival of Christianity, most people in Europe lived the way most people have always lived, in close-knit clans united by shared ancestry and convoluted family trees. The most common marriage was between cousins. The nuclear family and personal property weren't really concepts. Polygamy was practiced.
When the Church arrived, it set itself to breaking up the clans and replacing them with nuclear families and allegiance to the Church. It redefined incest to include cousins. It created the nuclear family, and most crucially, created the concept of legitimacy of children -- children could only be considered legitimate if they were the product of a Church-sponsored marriage, which had to be monogamous. And it created the concept of private ownership of land, and decreed that land could only be inherited by legitimate children.
What happened if someone died with no legitimate children? Their land went to the Church. And this was a one-way ratchet, land that went to the Church never left. Henrich's claim is that one of the major factors in the Protestant Reformation was that the Catholic Church owned over half the land in western Europe, which was putting the squeeze on everyone.
Until the arrival of Christianity, most people in Europe lived the way most people have always lived, in close-knit clans united by shared ancestry and convoluted family trees. The most common marriage was between cousins. The nuclear family and personal property weren't really concepts. Polygamy was practiced.
When the Church arrived, it set itself to breaking up the clans and replacing them with nuclear families and allegiance to the Church. It redefined incest to include cousins. It created the nuclear family, and most crucially, created the concept of legitimacy of children -- children could only be considered legitimate if they were the product of a Church-sponsored marriage, which had to be monogamous. And it created the concept of private ownership of land, and decreed that land could only be inherited by legitimate children.
What happened if someone died with no legitimate children? Their land went to the Church. And this was a one-way ratchet, land that went to the Church never left. Henrich's claim is that one of the major factors in the Protestant Reformation was that the Catholic Church owned over half the land in western Europe, which was putting the squeeze on everyone.