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.​

Billionaire rural wave

Taylor is part of a broader pattern in which ultrawealthy donors are focusing explicitly on small-town and rural America rather than the big-city universities and museums that long dominated philanthropy. Investment banker Byron Trott, who grew up in Union, Missouri, has pledged $150 million to a network of universities to boost enrollment from rural students, a push that has already helped drive a 20% increase in applications.​

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has similarly turned her attention to rural education, donating $36 million to North Carolina institutions such as Robeson Community College and Bladen Community College to bolster opportunities in some of the country’s poorest counties. Together, these gifts signal a recognition among billionaires that the country’s economic and political fault lines increasingly run between thriving metros and struggling rural regions—and that private money can move faster than federal policy.​

Politics, power and dependence

The surge of billionaire attention comes as rural voters remain a core political base for Trump, whose “forgotten men and women” rhetoric helped power his return to the White House but has not translated into a sweeping federal revival plan for small-town America. In that vacuum, philanthropists like Taylor, Trott, and Scott are effectively writing their own rural policy agendas through foundations and grantmaking, deciding which towns get ambulances, which fire departments get radios, and which students get a shot at college.

Trump’s administration has announced a $12 billion bailout for farmers in the wake of a wipeout amid his tariff regime, particularly for soybeans. At one point in 2025, as Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced support for like-minded ally Javier Milei in Argentina, China cut its U.S. soybean purchases to zero and began buying them from Argentina instead. After a Trump-Xi summit, China resumed soybean purchases, and more recently Argentina has repaid its full $20 billion credit line. Kentucky soybean farmer Caleb Ragland told the Associated Press in early January that Trump’s aid for farmers was “a Band-Aid on a deep wound. We need competition and opportunities in the market to make our future brighter.”

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.