Bill and Melinda Gates ... are deeply invested in American agriculture. The billionaire couple, in less than a decade, have accumulated more than 269,000 acres of farmland across 18 states. The farmland was purchased through a constellation of companies that all link back to the couple's investment group, Cascade Investments. Their land holdings range from 70,000 acres in north Louisiana, where their farmland grows soybeans, corn, cotton and rice, to 20,000 acres in Nebraska, where farmers grow soybeans. They bought and later sold an additional 6,000 acres in Georgia. In Washington, the Gateses own more than 14,000 acres of farmland that includes potato fields so massive that they are visible from space and some of which are processed into french fries for McDonald's. These land holdings are separate from their previous investments in companies that support large-scale farming like Monsanto and the tractor manufacturer John Deere. The trend worries young farmers who cannot compete with the likes of Bill Gates when buying land, according to Holly Rippon-Butler, a farmer in upstate New York. "If you're looking at what this means for farmers on the ground looking to access land, there's significant competition from nonfarmers, and that really affects young farmers because it means that the price that they're trying to compete with on the marketplace is driven and determined by people who are not dependent on a farming income," Rippon-Butler said.