Nobody follows and reports on farmland prices and ag economics quite like Landowner editor and blogger Mike Walsten. Lately, Mike’s been on a roll, with a great item on the recent auction of cash leases on 3,000 acres. Lease prices ranged from $400 to $530 per acre. Cash rents tend to lag movements in land [...]
News & Insights
Iowa cash leases $400 to $530 in Iowa land lease auction
February 2, 2012Farmers Dominate the Current Land Market
January 15, 2012With so much focus on farmland as an investment, it’s easy to get the idea that investors are the ones doing all the buying, but the opposite is true. In fact, investors were buying a higher percentage of the farmland in Illinois 2004 than farmers. (Illinois is the only state on which we have statistics, [...]
Resources for staying on top of ag industry
January 9, 2012We’ve come a long way from the time — just a few years ago — when we relied on the postman to bring us our newsletters and magazines on the agriculture industry, and when “networking” consisted largely of attending conferences. Now, many of our top ag journalists blog regularly and use social media (especially Twitter [...]
Debt on farmland is lower than in the 1980s
January 2, 2012People who fret about farmland prices getting too high tend to be overlooking the very low amount of debt owed by American farmers. The average U.S. farmer currently owes $9 for each $100 worth of assets. In the early 1980s, the average farmer owed $22 on every $100 worth of assets. In terms of actual [...]