Rural America is getting a bailout.
Billionaires are increasingly stepping in to plug gaps in services, education, and opportunity that many small towns say have been ignored for years. While Washington remains gridlocked over how to revive areas left behind by industrial and demographic change, a growing class of wealthy donors is quietly reshaping the economic future of the countryside with nine-figure checks and thousands of acres of land.
Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, who built Taylor Corp. into a printing empire and became his state’s wealthiest resident, is now redirecting a significant slice of his fortune back to the rural communities that raised him. The 84-year-old former dairy farm kid from outside Comfrey, Minnesota (pop. 376 as of 2024), is transferring farmland and securities worth roughly $100 million into the Taylor Family Farms Foundation, with a specific mandate to support rural areas in Minnesota and Iowa.
Rather than offering a one-time cash infusion, Taylor’s gift is structured to generate income for years, building on a 2023 transfer of about $173 million in farmland that already funds grants through regional nonprofit partners. Taylor said the move is rooted in his own upbringing in southern Minnesota, where he worked on farms and raised chickens, and in a desire to “make a positive impact on the lives of others in a region that I love so much,” Taylor said in a statement to the Observer.
