(Photo: Omer Ziv/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Australia is big, and much of it uninhabited, owing to harsh climates and dry weather. A lot of it, too, is farmland, nearly 30,000 square miles of which just sold to Chinese investors. 

That’s a lot of land. It’s almost as big as the state of South Carolina, or one percent of the land in the entirety of Australia. 

The price? $370 million Australian dollars, or around $288 million American dollars, which seems pretty cheap, likely because the vast majority of the land’s residents are tens of thousands of cattle. 

There are 150,000 to be exact, many of which will be slaughtered and exported as beef. The investors are a Chinese firm that also gave a small stake to Australian investors to pass muster with local regulators, which still need to approve the deal. 

The land is spread across the country’s interior, home to few Australians.