The federal government is by far the nation’s biggest land owner, holding 640 million acres of purple mountains, fruited plains and amber waves of grain in the name of the American public.

But over the past decade, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have been laying claim to ever-larger tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report, a magazine about land ownership in America.

In 2007, according to the Land Report, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land — equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined.

A decade later, the 100 largest landowners have holdings of 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. Their holdings are equivalent in area to the entirety of New England, minus Vermont.

Those rising numbers represent “the growing appeal of land as an asset class,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of the Land Report, in an interview.

The stock market has been on a tear in recent years, and some wealthy individuals have been looking to cash out and park their assets in a […]