Bill Gates owns this land just west of Malmo, Nebraska, which he rents to a local farmer.
After reading about Bill Gates' land holdings ("Nebraska land part of Gates' farm holdings," Jan. 27), I got to thinking about back in the late 1970s.
I was part of a lot of people here in Nebraska to get a petition going. That petition was Initiative 300, a petition to bar large corporations from buying land and owning large livestock operations in Nebraska who were not going to be on the operation to work the farm on a day-to-day basis.
That petition became law after a vote of the people of Nebraska, and yet a couple decades later, that law was struck down as unconstitutional by a judge from another state. Clearly, to me, that was unconstitutional that one judge could overturn a law that the people of Nebraska voted for.
This law was also clearly doing its job -- keeping large corporations out of agriculture in Nebraska. Right now, without the Initiative 300 law, we have capitalization at its highest -- big corporations owning everything, exactly what we farmers back in the '70s saw coming.
Merlin Fick, Ithaca
