The U.S. government’s announcement this week to ban the purchase of farmland by Chinese buyers will prove “helpful” to law enforcement officials in Oklahoma. In that state, 73% of land is used for farming — and an increasing share has been bought up by marijuana farmers with ties to the Chinese government.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Chief Brooke Rollins cited threats to national security and food security in her Tuesday announcement of the administration’s new ban. She added that she is also considering taking back existing land owned by Chinese investors.
“We certainly support any effort both on the local and federal level that’s gonna help us to prevent these criminal organizations from trying to get a foothold out here in Oklahoma,” Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics spokesman Mark Woodward told Straight Arrow News (SAN). “We think it could be very helpful. There’s certainly instances where we’ve had people that are working with these criminal organizations linked to China to try and purchase a large amount of Oklahoma property over the last five years.”
How did Oklahoma become a hotbed for Chinese pot farms?
Many of the illegal marijuana farms were set up in Oklahoma after the state legalized medical marijuana in 2018, and became known as the “wild, wild west of weed,” according to local law enforcement.
Locals largely opened the farms at first, the OBN told SAN. Then, in 2020, the OBN began receiving reports of Asian women “going door to door, asking if people are interested in selling their property,” according to Woodward.
As the state recorded an influx of marijuana farms known as “grows,” OBN began to investigate. By February 2021, Oklahoma officials fielded a growing number of calls about potential criminal activity at the farms.
And the calls didn’t just come from inside the state.
“Some of this started because we would start getting calls from law enforcement in other states saying that they stopped a truck, maybe a refrigerator truck, for example, for whatever violation, and it’s full of marijuana, and the driver says it came off of a marijuana farm in Oklahoma,” Woodward said. “So that obviously is a problem, because our law says that everything grown here has to be sold here.”
That led the bureau to pull agents from fentanyl cases to create a full investigative unit.
Woodward said the investigation first uncovered Fujianese, Cantonese and Mandarin websites where law firms wrote about Oklahoma’s COVID-19 protocols.
“Law firms and brokers had gone on during the pandemic and said, Oklahoma is not really locked down. Come to Oklahoma, we’ll help get you a license,” Woodward said.
Farmland in Oklahoma is significantly cheaper than in other states. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, a division of the USDA, Oklahoma farmland was valued at an average of $1,900 per acre in 2021. That’s about one-sixth the price of farmland in California, where the average acre was valued at $10,900 that same year.
Woodward says some farm owners received offers that were hard to turn down —
“sometimes offering 23 times what it’s worth.”
Oklahoma’s medicinal marijuana laws, approved by 57% of voters, were also among the nation’s most relaxed.
“The law was written in a way that even our partners in California said it was too liberal and would never pass, because it didn’t have any safeguards in place,” Woodward said.
According to the 2018 law, Oklahoma didn’t require patients to have any specific medical condition to qualify for a card. Fees to get into the growing business were also low.
‘Ghost farms’ crop up across Oklahoma
While the law stated that 75% of any farm’s ownership must belong to someone who has lived in Oklahoma for at least two years, those rules were easy to navigate around.
“So, these law firms even said, ‘Don’t worry about that part. We will find somebody to put down as your 75% owner. You just bring your 25% here and pay us a fee, and you can get up and going,’” Woodward said.
The setup is called “ghost ownership.”
“You can tell within the first few minutes; these people do not own this farm. They know nothing about it. They don’t know anything about the day-to-day operation,” Woodward said.
“Eventually they break down and admit, ‘Yeah, I was approached and asked if I’d like to make $1,000 a month, or $2,000 a month. And all I had to do was sign a piece of paper that said, I own a farm or two or three, or eight or ten,’” Woodward continued. “And they get paid, and they just go to the mailbox once a month for a check, and they really know nothing about it.”
It happened a lot, the OBN found. In one case, testimonies revealed a 70-year-old legal secretary, Kathleen Windler, was listed as the principal owner for more than 300 farms. While Windler’s case was dismissed, her co-worker, attorney Logan Michael Jones, pleaded no contest to seven felony counts. He received probation, fines and agreed to quit being an attorney.
Ghost ownership helped push the number of Oklahoma pot farms from 3,000 in 2020 to around 8,400 farms by the end of 2022.
Behind the ghost owners, Woodward said, is a network of Chinese organized crime tied to human trafficking, sex trafficking, murder and more.
Organized crime violence comes stateside
Reports from ProPublica show just how deep the connections to Chinese organized crime go. Among the gangs involved is 14K Triad, a dominant player in helping Latin drug lords launder U.S.-made money.
On Nov. 20, 2022, a violent incident put the spotlight on the organized crime behind these farms. Investigators say 45-year-old Chinese national Chen Wu shot and killed four other Chinese nationals working at a farm northwest of Oklahoma City.
“Basically, a Chinese assassin showed up on the farm,” Woodward said. “He was told, collect the $300,000 that were owed and if they don’t pay, kill everybody, and we’ll just replace those workers and managers.”
Wu was later arrested in Florida and last year received a life sentence for the crime. Woodward also said Wu asked not to be extradited to Oklahoma where he feared he would be killed for failing his mission of quietly killing the farmworkers.
“Other people had provided us information where they suspected that others were being killed and they’re just being buried in the tree lines and replaced with other workers and managers, and nobody’s missing them because many of them are undocumented,” Woodward said.
Trafficking of workers is a big concern for Woodward and the OBN.
“We started uncovering some of these workers that we could tell by the living conditions that it was labor trafficking. You could, in some cases, we would try to talk to them through interpreters, and they would just say, ‘I’m happy,’” Woodward said. “They wouldn’t ask for help because they were terrified to go back to China.”
The power behind pot farms
The farms’ power pyramid goes beyond crime lords and connects to the Chinese government, according to ProPublica.
“This is being controlled at its highest levels by major Chinese organized crime groups that function all over the world, including, say, the 14k Triad, which is a very well-known Chinese organized crime group, which has open links to the Chinese state,” Sebastian Rotella, a ProPublica reporter, told SAN. “There’s a particular boss of the 14K Triad who has been sanctioned publicly by the U.S. government for his support for the Chinese Communist Party and for activities of political influence and other activities on behalf of the Chinese state around the world.”
Rotella’s reporting found that a senior Chinese diplomat met with leaders of Chinese criminal organizations running thousands of farms. At a Senate hearing in 2021, U.S. Department of Defense leaders outlined how the Chinese state maintains a working relationship with Chinese organized crime.
“They’re also involved with U.S. officials or people contributing to political campaigns,” Rotella said. “So, there’s the thesis is that Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state have increasingly converged in the past 10 years, and that the Chinese state uses Chinese organized crime for activities like political influence, like funding espionage, and in particular, monitoring and controlling and spying on the Chinese diaspora.”
“We have absolutely found links from a lowly, small marijuana farm, all the way to the Chinese government,” Woodward said.
Across the nation, China owns more than 300,000 acres of farmland, prompting concerns from both political parties. In 2024, Republicans and Democrats alike spent millions on campaign ads sounding alarms about the issue as both an economic and security threat.
“I applaud the foresight and leadership of Secretary Rollins and her colleagues to defend and strengthen American agriculture,” Oklahoma Secretary of Agriculture Blayne Arthur said in a Tuesday statement. “I look forward to supporting these efforts on behalf of our Oklahoma farmers and ranchers and all Americans who count on the safe, reliable, and nutritious food we produce in the United States.”
The work in Oklahoma has long been underway.
In the last few years, the OBN began working to eliminate illegal Chinese grows. As part of their crackdown on these farms, Woodward said the bureau sometimes still serves two or three farms per week.
Many of the grows were removed when the farm’s leadership attempted to renew their license, which was difficult due to all the straw owners.
Woodward says when owners would apply to renew their license, law enforcement would now ask for an in-person interview. He says many times when law enforcement would try to schedule that interview, the person would just withdraw their application.
“They started to realize the days of just paying your money and putting somebody out there with a clean background as your owner were over,” Woodward said. “So, we started to flip the script a little bit.”
As they made progress in eliminating these illegal grows, the Chinese government took notice. Woodward claimed Salt Typhoon, a known hacking group connected to the Chinese government accused of carrying out cyberattacks across the United States, hacked his agency’s network.
“When you think of the totality of the Chinese involvement and influence around the world and what they’re concerned about, and for them to target us, it was very telling,” Woodward said. “Probably because they wanted to find out what we knew, who we were getting close to, and I think that’s why we were of interest to them.”
OBN’s crackdown continued, tallying hundreds of arrests as the number of operational farms dropped to about 2,100. Of those, Woodward said 1,700 are still under investigation.
“We do have ongoing investigations all over the U.S., working with our federal partners to go after the higher ups, but those higher ups are typically not hanging around these farms here in Oklahoma,” Woodward said. “So it’s not like we’re getting the head of the snake every time we hit a farm, but every time we hit one, we’re unplugging a critical part of the rest of that particular cell group that’s operating in Oklahoma.”
