The Benetton family’s group has sold its farmland in Argentina, more than 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres), to a group led by Mariano Bosch, the chief executive of the agribusiness and energy company Adecoagro, according to people familiar with the deal.
The buyers are Adecoagro shareholders and directors acting in their own right, not the company. They bought two companies, Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino and Ganadera Cóndor, which hold land in the Patagonian provinces of Santa Cruz, Chubut and Río Negro and in the south of Buenos Aires province.
Sheep are the main business, about 250,000 head, which makes the company the country’s biggest wool producer. It also grows crops in Buenos Aires province and has 10,000 hectares of planted pine. Agustín Dranovsky, who runs the business, stays on as chief executive.
Adecoagro, which operates in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, has been controlled since 2025 by Tether, the crypto company that issues the dollar-linked USDT token.
The sale ends 35 years of Benetton ownership at a time when foreign ownership of farmland is the subject of a legal fight. The Rural Land Law caps foreign-held rural land at 15% nationwide; Milei’s 2023 deregulation decree repealed it, and the Supreme Court last month temporarily restored limits on foreign land ownership until a federal judge in Bariloche rules on the case.