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Gates's Cottonwood Ag Management and Leading Harvest Launch Farmland Sustainability Certification Standard
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Cottonwood Ag Management — the entity overseeing Bill Gates's 269,000-acre US farmland portfolio — provided founding support for Leading Harvest, a nonprofit that developed a third-party sustainability certification standard for large-scale row-crop farming. Leading Harvest's standard covers soil health, water quality, biodiversity, and worker welfare across continuous-cultivation cropland; it targets institutional farmland investors seeking ESG certification analogous to FSC for timber. Critics noted that the standard does not require carbon sequestration targets or limit synthetic fertiliser use.
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Related Accomplishments
2026
Gates Foundation Trust Sells Off the Last of Its Microsoft Stock
In the first quarter of 2026, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust sold its remaining Microsoft shares, fully exiting a position in the very company that created Gates's fortune — capping a long, deliberate diversification away from the stock. The endowment that funds Gates's philanthropy, managed separately from its grant-making through Cascade, is now anchored instead by Berkshire Hathaway, Waste Management, railroads, and heavy-equipment makers. The sale underscored how thoroughly Gates's giving had decoupled from Microsoft's day-to-day fortunes.
2026
Gates's Charitable Endowment Is Now Led by Berkshire, Not Microsoft
By 2026, the publicly disclosed stock portfolio of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust — the endowment that funds Gates's philanthropy — was led not by Microsoft but by Berkshire Hathaway, Waste Management, Canadian National Railway, Caterpillar, and Deere. Decades of diversification, plus Warren Buffett's stock gifts, left it concentrated in railroads, waste, heavy equipment, and Buffett's conglomerate, while Microsoft — the source of the original fortune — had largely been sold down. The unglamorous, value-oriented mix reflects the long stewardship of Gates's money manager, Michael Larson, through Cascade Investment.
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