No. 1
FARMLAND RESERVE
Florida acres: 626,600
An auxiliary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, investor and operator Farmland Reserve earns returns to fund the church’s mission and works.
Founded 75 years ago, the church’s 295,000-acre Deseret Ranch in Orange, Osceola and Brevard is one of the nation’s largest cow-calf operations. (Florida’s role as a major cattle state is to produce calves that are shipped to feedlots in the central U.S.)
Farmland became Florida’s largest private landowner in 2014 when it bought 382,000 acres of timberland in north Florida. Deseret Cattle & Timber, as Farmland calls its north Florida holdings, has 330,000 acres in Bay, Gulf, Calhoun, Liberty, Gadsden and Franklin counties. Farmland also has 2,600 acres in Suwannee County leased to local farmers. In addition to agriculture, Farmland leases land to utilities and solar power providers for seven solar power plants. Several more are in permitting and developing.
CEO Doug Rose says Farmland works to balance protecting natural resources while addressing Florida’s growth. Farmland has hired Lake Nona developer Tavistock to create Sunbridge, a 27,447-acre project in Osceola and Orange counties, a step in developing Deseret. By 2080, the ranchland could have a half million residents.
Farmland last year petitioned the city of Orlando to annex 52,450 of Deseret’s Orange County acres but was thwarted by a county-city agreement that stopped the annexation. Rose says Farmland will evaluate what to do next.
“With more than 70 years in Florida agriculture, we expect to be farming and ranching in Florida for many decades to come,” Rose says. “Farmland Reserve and Deseret Ranch are not developers, but we intend to be involved in planning for how our land will be used as the rest of this century unfolds.”
No. 2
FOUR RIVERS LAND & TIMBER CO.
Florida acres: 550,000
Hungarian native Thomas Peterffy came penniless to the United States in 1965 at age 21. He taught himself computer programming and pioneered electronic trading. He built his $42-billion fortune on a digital trading platform for sophisticated investors, Interactive Brokers. The Palm Beacher was Florida’s richest man until Citadel founder Ken Griffin moved here in 2022 from Chicago.
Peterffy spent some of his wealth — at least $710 million — in 2015 to buy the timber holdings of business executive and investor Howard Leach’s Foley Timber in Florida’s Big Bend. The purchase made Peterffy the owner of the largest contiguous privately held property in Florida and one of the largest east of the Mississippi. It covers half of Taylor County and spreads into neighboring counties.
Travis McCoy, an executive under Leach’s Foley who continues as a senior vice president in Perry with Four Rivers, says the Four Rivers plan is to “develop, manage and enhance the region’s timber assets and, in doing so, support our local communities.” He says that Four Rivers is “exploring opportunities” either alone or partnering with others “to increase and diversify wood consumption in our region.”
Peterffy also owns 33,000 acres of Highlands County ranchland he purchased from the heirs of citrus baron Ben Hill Griffin Jr.
No. 3
RAYONIER
Florida acres: 397,000 leased and owned
Owner of a wealth of acres along Interstate 95 between Daytona Beach and Savannah, Rayonier, like most timber companies, historically sold land when development got close enough to reap more money from developers than timber. In 2016, it launched Wildlight in Nassau County, a lightly populated county on the Georgia border north of Jacksonville. The mixed-use development was to serve as a proof of concept that Rayonier could unlock value in the 3,000 acres around it and the 50,000 acres Rayonier owned within a 10-mile radius. “We believe the success of Wildlight will add substantial value to our neighboring timberlands,” CEO David Nunes wrote to shareholders in his last annual report letter before retiring.
He said the company has engaged with local governments in northeast Florida and southeast Georgia about other Rayonier lands with development potential. He forecast that operating earnings from real estate development will average $40 million a year from 2026 to 2030, up from $28 million on average from 2021 to 2025. In New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest and Southern U.S., Rayonier owns 2.7 million acres. Most of the Southern timberland is in loblolly and slash pine. Rayonier didn’t respond to questions by press time.
No. 4
MOSAIC
Florida acres: 368,000
The phosphate mining company’s holdings in DeSoto, Hardee, Hillsborough, Manatee and Polk include land it owns outright and land on which it has mineral rights or mining agreements. Most of its present and future mining sites have been in company ownership for more than 50 years. Over time, as phosphate deposits are mined out, more of its land becomes available for uses other than phosphate operations. “Our long-term future land use strategy is to optimize the value of our land assets,” it told investors in its last annual report. Mosaic received attention for reclaiming one former mining site to create the 7,000-acre Streamsong Resort hotel, golfing and conference center. It sold it in 2023 for $158 million for a gain of $57 million. Mosaic says the book value of its Florida phosphate mines and exploration properties is $1.9 billion. Mosaic didn’t respond to questions. Its operations went offline in last year’s hurricanes but were restored. Mosaic told investors it expected the fourth quarter to be short 200,000 to 250,000 tons of phosphate because of the storms.
No. 5
LYKES BROS.
Florida acres: 339,971
Founded in 1900 by doctor and rancher Howell Tyson Lykes and his seven sons, family-owned Lykes Bros. once encompassed Peoples Gas, Lykes hot dogs and meats, the state’s fourth largest bank, Sunkist juice, insurance and a steamship line. After divesting those assets decades ago, Lykes Bros. nowadays relies on its ranching roots. Its 14,000-head herd is one of the largest cow-calf operations in America. Lykes Bros. also owns 274,268 acres in Texas.
In Florida, the majority of its land is in Glades County where it owns, according to the county Property Appraiser’s office, 269,011 acres that the county values at $2.2 billion. It has another 69,733 acres in Highlands County.
The Lykes’ portfolio includes row crops, forestry and hunting grounds plus water resource management. It has sold conservation easements on some of that land, which preserves it from development. In partnership with government, Lykes’ land is home to three water projects totaling 26,000 acres that clean and store water in the Okeechobee watershed. Lykes employs 91 in Florida. “With our land and our people, we look forward to being a part of addressing Florida’s future challenges and opportunities,” says CEO Johnnie James.
No. 6
WEYERHAEUSER
Florida acres: 272,000
Seattle-based Weyerhaeuser became big in Florida via its 2016 merger with Plum Creek, once Florida’s largest private landowner. Weyerhaeuser now owns 272,000 acres spread over 19 north-central Florida counties. One contiguous property, at 130,000 acres in Columbia, Union and Baker counties, includes a portion important to the “Florida Wildlife Corridor” connecting Ocala and Osceola national forests. A different portion of that property most likely will be developed, the company says. “The advantage of partnering with large landowners such as Weyerhaeuser is that we have a large enough footprint to properly plan for many different land uses — and also combining those uses to answer many public needs, from conservation to renewable energy development,” says spokesman Deano Orr.
Orr notes that forest products are a cyclical industry currently in a downturn. In Florida, three pulp mills and two sawmills have closed or curtailed operations, part of an industry trend in the Southern U.S. “As a preferred supplier within our operating area, Weyerhaeuser will be well-positioned to take advantage of improved market conditions once they occur,” Orr says.
Weyerhaeuser’s North Florida Mega Industrial Park, a 2,622-acre site near Lake City, saw its first end-user, Michigan-based liquid fertilizer company AgroLiquid, break ground last year for a factory scheduled to open later this year.
Weyerhauser owns or controls 10.5 million acres of timberland in the United States and manages another 14.1 million under long-term leases in Canada.
No. 7
FPL
Florida acres: 251,466
The state’s largest utility didn’t make our 2011 list of the state’s largest private property owners. Now it ranks seventh with 251,466 acres, thanks to its appetite for land for solar power plants, according to real estate firm SVN Saunders Ralston Dantzler.
FPL wouldn’t tell Florida Trend how many acres it owns, but it did say it has 197,000 acres dedicated to current and future solar power plants. Its nuclear plant sites are 12,000 acres. That makes for 209,000 acres, but it, of course, has power plants and facilities across the 43 counties where it serves 12 million people.
In several counties across Florida, it’s become one of the largest landowners. In Martin County, immediately north of Palm Beach County, for example, FPL owns 22,035 acres.
In 2023, it paid Dubai $212 million for the 40,000-acre El Maximo ranch in Osceola County. “We are very early in the process of determining potential uses at the El Maximo property,” says FPL spokesman Marshall Hastings.
FPL says not every acre it owns for solar gets covered by panels. It also says it will build solar only so long as it’s the lowest cost way to deliver power. While awaiting development into solar power plants, FPL licenses land to local ranchers and growers, which lowers costs.
Solar Size
The most land-hungry form of electricity generation re-shapes the Florida landscape, turning pasture, defunct orange groves and timber stands into legions of solar panels. Florida Trend in 2023 estimated 40,000 to 48,000 acres of Florida already were occupied by utility-scale solar power plants. It’s only growing.
Consider the state’s solar leader. In the next three years alone, Juno Beach-based FPL plans 46 new solar sites totaling 42,872 acres, or 66 square miles. Its 10-year site plan filed with the state Public Service Commission envisions adding 21,009 megawatts of solar power by 2033, up from its 4,803 megawatts at year-end 2023. That equals 282 new solar power plants. As of April, it had 88 solar facilities, according to a PSC filing.
No. 8
U.S. SUGAR
Florida acres: 233,500
Longtime U.S. Sugar CEO Robert Buker Jr. and lead lobbyist Robert Coker both retired a year ago. But the guiding plan remains the same for the 1,200-employee company based in Clewiston in Hendry County: Use its land around Lake Okeechobee to farm sugar and other commodities.
U.S. Sugar produces 15% of the nation’s sugar on the 175,000 acres it plants in sugarcane. It owns a 300-mile short-line railroad serving the farming region. It plants 14,263 acres in sweet corn. The region is the largest source of winter and spring sweet corn on the eastern seaboard.
Founded in 1931 by General Motors co-owner Charles Mott, the company has been majority-owned by its employees since the 1980s. (Mott’s foundation still has a stake, as does the Mott Children’s Health Center in Mott’s hometown of Flint, Mich.) The company has bought land in recent years north of Lake Okeechobee in Martin, Hendry, Glades and Palm Beach counties from farming companies Duda, Knight Management and others. Spokesman Ryan Duffy says the company is open to acquiring more land on a “case-by-case” basis.
Buker, upon retiring, said that over his career, U.S. Sugar “confronted legal, political, and constitutional challenges from activists, and emerged from them not only victorious but also with our integrity intact. Time has proven that our decisions have been to the benefit of our shareholders, our employees and our communities.”
No. 9
ST. JOE CO.
Florida acres: 168,000
Historically Florida’s largest private landowner, St. Joe pivoted in 2015, selling 382,000 acres — to No. 1 on our list, Farmland Reserve — to focus on developing the largest planned community in Florida. Today, 87% of St. Joe land is in Bay, Walton and Gulf counties in Northwest Florida, and 90% of it is within 15 miles of the Gulf of Mexico. St. Joe’s plan keeps 53,000 acres in conservation while developing the remaining 110,500 acres over 50 years.
Its development strategy included donating the land for the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport and for schools, parks and sports parks.
A second pivot came nearly a decade ago. The former timberland and paper company would continue selling land to home builders. But it would also create recurring revenue streams in the form of company-owned hotels, offices and shopping centers. Such development makes residential land more attractive to permanent residents who in turn patronize stores and offices, creating a virtuous circle. Leasing revenue in 2023 hit $50.8 million, up from $9.8 million in 2016.
“We live in this community and we’re here every day,” says St. Joe spokesman Mike Kerrigan. “Our kids go to the schools in these communities where we have our projects. It puts you in a different mindset as a developer. When we go to church or the grocery store, people know we’re here.”
No. 10
FLORIDA CRYSTALS
Florida acres: 161,000
The Fanjul family began milling sugar in Cuba 175 years ago. After Fidel Castro set up his dictatorship, the Fanjuls started over in Florida. Their Florida Crystals has an agricultural waste-to- electricity renewable energy plant in Palm Beach County to power its operations. It also grows rice. But it’s best known for growing sugar and vegetables in the Everglades Agricultural Area. It owns the largest Regenerative Organic Certified farm in the country. It’s also the only such certified sugarcane grower in the United States and built one of the 10 largest compost facilities in America. (Palm Beach, as the company notes, is the nation’s winter vegetable capital and is the largest agricultural county east of the Mississippi.) Florida Crystals employs 2,000, all told, and farms 196,700 acres — 161,000 of which it owns — almost entirely in Palm Beach County. Because it puts owl nesting boxes on its farmlands, it has one of the highest concentrations of barn owls in America. Owls control rodents without using rodenticides. The Fanjuls also own 240,000 acres in the Dominican Republic and own Domino Sugar and other brands. The family in Florida has two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a rice mill powered by a solar array, a packaging plant and a Tesla megapack battery storage system.
The Long Goodbye?
In 1970, Florida had 941,471 acres planted in citrus. That was about one in every 35 acres in the state. Today, the number of acres has fallen by two-thirds. Greening disease, which appeared in Florida in 2005, decimated groves.
U.S. Sugar, Florida’s seventh largest private landowner, in the mid-1980s had 29,000 acres of orange groves. It now has 1,000 acres. It closed its citrus plant in 2019 and has been converting groves to sugarcane and vegetables.
Lykes Bros., Florida’s fifth largest private landowner, has also greatly reduced acreage in active citrus production. Lykes itself has less than 1000 acres in active production and leases an additional 16,767 acres to others for citrus operations. “Even with the many challenges, the rich history of the citrus industry along with the ongoing commitment to research and innovation gives us some optimism, but time is running out on the industry,” says Lykes President and CEO Johnnie James.
“We’re really seeing the citrus industry as we know it disintegrate in front of our eyes. That opens up a lot of land, and what do you do with it? Do you convert it to another ag use? Do you convert it to solar? Or do you convert it for houses? Those are the big questions.”
— Dean Saunders, founder and managing director of SVN Saunders Ralston Dantzler Real Estate
Tree Debris
Little attention gets paid but large losses are incurred when hurricanes batter timberland.
Hurricane Helene in September made landfall in Taylor County, half of which is timberland owned by Four Rivers Land & Timber Co., the state’s second largest private landowner. Damage from Helene “is significant both in acreage and economic impact,” Four Rivers Senior Vice President Travis McCoy says.
Category 5 Hurricane Michael in 2018 did such damage to Forest Investment Associates’ (FIA) Bear Creek holdings that the firm had to replant more than 40,000 acres with 20 million trees — “bringing this land back into sustainable working forest and demonstrating our commitment to stewardship of our land,” says Chad Lincoln, FIA’s southern region operations manager. Atlanta-based FIA manages 155,000 acres in Florida for clients. It’s one of Florida’s largest private landowners, though not in the top 10. “The damage on Bear Creek from Michael was unlike anything ever experienced on our properties,” one of its executives wrote in an industry publication. It took a month to reopen the primary forestry roads. Older stands of trees had as much as 150 to 200 tons of debris per acre. Novel solutions to clearing debris included a combination of heavy equipment and hundreds of feet of ship-anchor chain.
Timber is a cyclical industry. In 2021, the state had 16.8 million acres of timberland. That was 634,407 more acres than in 2004 but down 621,245 acres from 2011, a recent peak for timber, the Florida Forest Service reports.