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'It's a suit designed to force the farmers to lawyer up, spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyering and maybe at the end of the day, bankrupt themselves,' Garamendi told News Nation.
'In fact, that has happened to at least one family that I know of and I've heard rumors that another family simply said we can't afford the lawyers.
'Travis Air Force Base is absolutely essential. It is the gateway to the Pacific,' Garamendi said.
'A good deal of the munitions that are going to Ukraine also passed through Travis Air Force Base.'
In a letter to Solano County, the majority of which is owned by Flannery, the company described itself as being 'owned by a group of families looking to diversify their portfolio from equities into real assets, including agricultural land in the western United States,' according to county newspaper the Daily Republic.
The US Agriculture Department has made its own inquiries into who is behind Flannery but is reportedly yet to yield any results.
'Nobody can figure out who they are,' Ronald Kott, mayor of nearby Rio Vista, which is now largely surrounded by Flannery land, told The Wall Street Journal. 'Whatever they're doing - this looks like a very long-term play.'
Over the years that Flannery, registered in Delaware, has been buying up land, it has given a variety of accounts and indications as to what it wants to do with it.
An attorney for Flannery, Richard Melnyk, said in an email to the county in 2019 that it was considering working with local farmers to farm 'new types of crops or orchards,' according to The Journal.
Melnyk is referred to by name in the 'smoking gun' correspondence submitted to the court, which appears to show land owners private discussing the Flannery acquisitions.
'Melynk [sic] is bullying the last of the property owners,' reads one of the messages. 'I think we should have a meeting in the next two weeks to talk about Flannery.'
Mitch Mashburn, who works for the county, cast doubt on the viability of using the land for agricultural purposes.
'The majority of the land they're purchasing is dry farmland,' he told The Journal. 'I don't see where that land can turn a profit to make it worth almost a billion dollars in investment.'
In a separate email also seen by the newspaper, Melnyk said Flannery was considering leasing 'a substantial portion' of its land to olive growers, including some by the base.
According to online business records, an individual called Thomas Mather was listed as once being a director or officer for the company, though there is almost no other publicly available information on him.
He is also listed as the manager of another Delaware-registered company called Diversified Land LLC, with the same California address in Folsom.
The China-based food producer, Fufeng Group, planned to build a corn-milling plant on its new land in Grand Forks, just 20 minutes from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, where some of the nation's most sensitive drone technology is housed.
The purchase raised suspicions from military officers, national security experts and lawmakers alike.
A 2019 report from the US Department of Agriculture showed China owned at least 192,000 acres of US agricultural land worth over $1.9billion.
Though Canada, for example, owns far more US agricultural land, a 2018 USDA report showed China's agricultural holdings in the US and other counties had increased tenfold since 2009.