Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that he divested from his holdings of thousands of acres of North Dakota soybean farmland last week to comply with his federal ethics agreement.
The move will separate Mr. Bessent from properties that posed potential conflicts of interest as he leads President Trump’s trade negotiations with China, including Beijing’s commitment to buying American soybeans.
The divestment took place nearly eight months after Mr. Bessent was originally supposed to shed the assets. Federal officials are required to sell assets and investments that they could influence through their work for the U.S. government. The Treasury secretary, who has referred to himself as a “soybean farmer,” drew criticism from ethics watchdogs earlier this year for being slow to sell the properties.
“I’m involved in the agriculture industry. I run a soybean farm,” Mr. Bessent said on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” before adding, “I actually just divested it this week as part of my ethics agreement, so I’m out of that business.”
The U.S. government’s ethics watchdog agency wrote a letter to the Senate Finance Committee in August alerting lawmakers that Mr. Bessent was not in compliance with his ethics agreement. Treasury Department ethics officials said that Mr. Bessent had not sold the land because the assets are “illiquid and are not readily marketable.” Mr. Bessent had pledged to divest by Dec. 15.
According to his financial disclosure forms, Mr. Bessent owned as much as $25 million of soybean and corn farmland in North Dakota. The land constitutes thousands of acres in Burleigh, Kidder, Eddy, Benson and Wells Counties and earned Mr. Bessent as much as $1 million a year in rental income.
The farmland was controlled by a limited liability partnership called High Plains Acres. According to the most recent filing with the office of North Dakota’s secretary of state, Mr. Bessent’s husband, John Freeman, was a managing partner. An official with the North Dakota secretary of state’s office said last Friday that no additional documents had been filed that would indicate a change in management of the fund.
The terms of the divestment were not clear and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Office of Government Ethics did not respond to a request for comment and had not yet posted a filing to indicate that Mr. Bessent was in compliance with his agreement.
Agriculture policy has been central to the trade negotiations between the U.S. and China this year. China stopped buying American soybeans in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, inflicting economic pain on U.S. farmers.
As part of a trade truce reached in late October, China agreed to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States this year and at least 25 million metric tons of soybeans in each of the next three years. The 25 million metric tons was in line with the 25 to 30 metric tons that it had purchased in recent years.
The Trump administration is expected to offer “bridge payments” this week to farmers that have been harmed by the trade fight with China.
Mr. Bessent said on Sunday that while he was an investor in the farmland, his relatives actually work on it. A former hedge fund manager, he said that he understood the plight of struggling farmers.
“I probably know more about agriculture than any Treasury secretary since the 1800s,” Mr. Bessent said. “I can tell you that what farmers need is certainty, and we have put that in place with this trade deal.”
Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.
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