Professional athletes are the new robber barons

And land grant universities are helping them along

From Successful Farming

Check

Inner Life

later today for an essay by

<Mary L. Tabor>

on the poet Robert Hass.

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Football season is now long gone, but the most significant sports story of the past year was not the unlikely face-off between the Kelce brothers in the Super Bowl or the gravity-defying heroics that Patrick Mahomes managed on a severely sprained ankle. It was the news that Joe Burrow, along with several other athletes represented by the investment firm Patricof Co, had purchased an Iowa farm.

“Buying the farm” has long been a figure of speech for death, but farmland is making a comeback as an investment asset. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and many Chinese investors have been quietly acquiring Iowa farms for more than a decade. In fact, market speculators purchased nearly a third of the Iowa acres that were sold in 2022. 

Joe Burrow may have headlined this story because he was born in Ames, Iowa.¹ But I suspect that the real reason is that football and farming are baked into the mythology of the Heartland. Americans would rather think of Burrow as a farmer than as a tycoon, even though the only thing he will harvest from his venture will be the profits.

It is jarring to imagine sports heroes as robber barons, since they earn their wealth by the sweat of their brow, like laborers do. But Burrow and his cohort have more in common with Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and James B. Duke than they do with the Iowa farmers who will lease their land. Duke built his fortune through the American Tobacco Company, a monopoly which bankrupted many small farmers. One of them was Wendell Berry’s grandfather. In his essay “It All Turns on Affection,” Berry recounts his grandfather’s heartbreak after taking a year’s worth of tobacco to Louisville in 1907 only to return home penniless, having earned just enough to cover the cost of transporting the crop to auction. 

A bronze statue of James B. Duke at Duke University honors him as an industrialist and a philanthropist, two terms that Berry sees as contradictory. “The man thus commemorated seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy,” Berry writes. “But I did know the connection. I felt it instantly and physically. The connection was my grandparents and thousands of others more or less like them. If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough such farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of ‘philanthropy.’”

Burrow and his cohort surely do not intend to make life harder for small farmers, but according to agricultural experts Patricof Co’s purchase fuels the rising value of farmland, as well as higher lease rates and more onerous mortgage financing for farmers who do not own their own acreage outright. Investments in agriculture are attractive because federal subsidies for crop insurance and crop prices minimize the risks. And this does not include separate payments, such as the billions of dollars earmarked for agriculture in legislation like the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. It is well known that these payments overwhelmingly benefit the already-wealthy: 79 percent of the farm subsidies over the last 25 years have gone to the top 10 percent of farm owners.

Now American taxpayers are also padding capital gains for athletic elites.

If this seems upside down, consider that the two universities that helped Joe Burrow reach the NFL — Ohio State University and Louisiana State University — were both beneficiaries of the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862.² The 1862 bill appropriated land and federal monies for universities that offered education in agriculture and the mechanical arts, and an updated version in 1890 expanded opportunities in agriculture for people of color. Land grant universities have existed, historically, to diversify agriculture, not to produce wealthy landowners with no expertise in farming. 

The relationship between the academic mission of universities and their athletic programs has long been fraught. But even successful coaches and athletic directors are tiring of the naked opportunism that name, image, and likeness deals encourage. Many college athletes are now businesspeople first and teammates second (or third). I rolled my eyes when Luke McCaffrey, once a star recruit at the University of Nebraska, transferred to Louisville and then, just five months later, after learning that he wouldn’t be the starting quarterback, transferred again to Rice University. But that story is increasingly common. Burrow’s meteoric rise might never have happened if he had remained buried in the depth chart at Ohio State.

We like to think of wealth as a byproduct of hard work — the competitor’s just deserts. But some influencers leverage success on the court or the field to a point where they can walk away from the sport altogether, possibly even before they have reached their prime. Athletes have been capitalizing on celebrity for generations, either through endorsements or through post-retirement careers as television personalities. And you might say that Patricof Co’s Iowa investment is just a strategic real estate acquisition — nothing new for clients with cash to burn. Perhaps it’s the externalized costs of agriculture — the impact on water quality, wildlife, and public health — that make the farm purchase feel like something new under the sun. Maybe it’s the reminder of all the Nebraska football players I taught for poverty wages as a teaching assistant, the list of easy courses for athletes that every university has, the knowledge that nearly every blockbuster contract is built on the backs of adjuncts, tutors, and other invisible staff who give the lie to the meritocratic ideal.

Maybe it’s the thought of a farmer paying Joe Burrow for the right to farm that I just can’t stomach.

According to Front Office Sports, the fund that Burrow and others contributed to will be leveraged to purchase as many as four additional farms, possibly including a watermelon farm in Oregon. But if Burrow and his partners aspire to more than simply adding zeros to their assets, they might consider investing in programs that honor the democratization of agriculture. Instead of pricing out small farmers by driving up land values, athletes might support Veterans in Agriculture, a coalition that provides knowledge, capital, and land to men and women who find purpose and healing in tending crops. They might partner with Practical Farmers of Iowa, a nonprofit that serves small producers, young people, and their rural communities. Better yet, they might invest in women farmers or ranchers.

Wallace Stegner, who mentored Wendell Berry at Stanford University, distinguished between two kinds of Americans: boomers and stickers. Boomers are always on the move, pillaging profits and externalizing the costs, whereas stickers aim to stay put, reaping the rewards of their labor but also the consequences of their mistakes and the pain of hard times. Professional athletes are boomers out of necessity, making bank while their body allows and chasing the most lucrative contracts across the country. But athletes with enough wealth to invest can do better than skimming the cream from the rural communities that continue to cheer them on. 

1. The Burrow family, like many American families, isn’t “from” anywhere. Joe was born in Iowa because his father was then an assistant football coach at Iowa State University. The family moved to Nebraska, North Dakota, and finally Ohio as Jim Burrow climbed the coaching ladder. While Joe assuredly knew many farm boys throughout his youth, he never was one.

2. The Ohio State University was founded as a land-grant university, per the Morrill Act, in 1870. Louisiana State University merged with Louisiana State Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1877 to become the state’s first land-grant institution.