farms

A majority of small family farms in the United States operate with high-risk profit margins. Four years ago, Roni Ryan started goat yoga at her farmstead in Poulsbo, Wash., and it’s been a major source of income since then. But with an increasing number of challenges, even adorable baby animals may not keep her farm in the black.

Seattle’s technology billionaires are many things: innovators, visionaries, philanthropists and some less polite descriptors, depending on whom you ask. But thanks to some scrupulous digging by industry journal The Land Report, which tracks land ownership across the country, we now know that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has another feather in his multi hyphenated career cap: America’s Top Private Owner of Farmland.

American farmers spend about $32 billion each year to rent land, and Tillable CEO Corbett Kull thinks his company could be farmland's AirBnB or Zillow. "This is one of the beauties of digital marketplaces, where you can bring two parties together that otherwise might never meet," he says.

1:00Two projects that would convert cropland in Oregon and Washington into large solar farms are hitting new bumps. Last week the Oregon Court of Appeals issued a ruling that blocks a planned 80-acre solar project on farmland outside Medford in southern Oregon.