This past year, investment in (and development of) agricultural properties has continued at a rapid pace in South America, for both large farming companies and institutional investors. These farming companies and investors are looking to take advantage of the counter-seasonal aspects of farming in South America that allow them to provide products to U.S. supermarkets [...]

The March USDA citrus forecast projected 83.35 million boxes of citrus produced in the state of Florida for 2018-2019. This is a big uptick from the 49.55 million boxes produced in 2017-2018 after Hurricane Irma devastated citrus production in the state. This forecast is also an increase from the 78.23 million boxes produced prior to [...]

 The last six to eight months have been a bit of a rollercoaster for Midwest row crops with rising interest rates, softening commodity prices and overall uncertainty in the market due to trade relations. Despite these headwinds, the demand for farmland has remained strong this winter, and prices have maintained stability. There are a few [...]

A bipartisan bill, the “Family Farmer Relief Act of 2019”, has been introduced in the Senate to make Chapter 12 bankruptcies accessible to more family farms in need of debt relief. Our friends at Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP have summarized the advantages this could provide small to mid-sized farming operations as compared to [...]

Farming operations are finding it more difficult to deal with current operating debt and to get approved for financing. This is demonstrated by the Chicago Fed AgLetter’s loan demand and funds availability indexes. To determine these indexes, ag bankers are asked whether conditions in the current quarter are better or worse than those of the [...]

Murray Wise, ALC and Ben Crosby, ALC take home the Realtors® Land Institute (RLI) award for 2018 Largest ALC-to-ALC Transaction. MWA and Crosby & Associates, Inc. served as transactional advisors to the Latt Maxcy Corp. in connection with the sale of the El Maximo Ranch in Osceola Co., FL. The 38,000+ acre ranch was sold [...]

This fall, we had the opportunity to market two properties with two very different types of conservation easements. (Think permanent easement, rather than a term program such as the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP.) The first owner used a conservation easement to preserve prime central Illinois farmland, ensuring it would remain in production and never [...]

In the 2017 Fourth Quarter edition of The Wise Ag Update, we discussed California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) and the mandated development of groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) for various parts of the state. The questions we proposed then were: How would the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act shape how farmers use water with crop allocations? [...]

This summer Iowa State University came out with its annual survey of Iowa farmland owners and reported that 82 percent of farmland in the state is debt-free. That was the highest percentage of debt-free land in the report’s history. In contrast, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in its most recent AgLetter reported that the [...]