Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living Farmland sale yesterday.

Short quarter sold for $15,400.

An 80 for $13,900.

Buy in bulk! It's cheaper.

Wabi, I'm guessing you are talking about per acre.

Ye$.

And there til someone ruined it I thought land was selling for a reasonable price in your area.

In all seriousness, how does one pay for the land, equipment,seed, fertilizer, chemicals and still make a living if they do not inherit the land?

Big question mark?

One has the financial strength to make sure that no young whippersnapper gets the opportunity to make a life farming.

I don't see how.

Much of my farm was purchased during the '80s collapse for <10% of what it's worth now. It was totally stupid luck on our part.
Coming out of the oilfield with some money and my dad says this oughta be a good investment. It was.

I think a lot of the insane land prices now days are coming from big money from the coasts. People who have lots of cash and want to own
something that will maintain some value when the inevitable dollar collapse happens.


Even if we can maintain the $5.50 corn and $12.50 beans, I don't see how one could pay for 14k/acre farm ground. The interest alone would wipe ya out.

Those farms were bought by a trucker.

Bought by a trucker with one truck or does he have a fleet of trucks?

I don't know Wayne.

Must be a fleet.

It can be done with a different business model, but I am not talking about $14,000/acre farm land. First off, I took over the 300 acre farm that my family started in 1862. I did not inherit it , rather realizing that it was my Dad and Mother's life work and it should be their retirement, they gave me a good deal to pay it off. The smartest thing I did was sell the dairy herd and expand the small beef herd. Second, I bought a used Pettibone log skidder that made me more money than the 60 dairy cows I was milking.

Next, I took advantage of the equity in the farm and machinery rather than gamble in the stock market. I began buying the 400 acre or less farms near me. Like my farm they are located in what is called the Driftless Region of Wisconsin. That means the glaciers never came through. High percentage of suitable pasture, timber and lower percentage of tillable. You could farm three sides of the land and you had to be careful not fall off the farm. LOL.

I logged the timber and enrolled the poor or steep tillable in CRP. ( If you have enough CRP, it is a great way to help pay off the farm). Before I would log, I called in the local DNR forester to select harvest trees and mark trash trees to open canopy for desirable species. In addition, I purchased oak and walnut seedlings from the local DNR nursery to plant some stoney poor ag land and rented their tree planter so in a sense I am farming trees, too. Then I noticed the small farms in the area became more valuable as hunting and recreational property and took advantage of that. Looking back I should have got a real estate license. DIVERSIFY !!!

Mike Green, and the family, Green Auction, do a good job of selling farmland, and everything else, and they have be making a lot of money!

Big city money from Chicago too. They buy it, rent out to crop farmers but hold the rights to hunt.

We sold a 67+/- acre farm to the neighbor for $11,800 per acre. It is a ridge-till farm with a good, but not great well, on it and is shaped sort of like the State of Idaho, so a center-pivot sprinkler wouldn't work. The neighbor is going to tear out the Osage Orange wind-break on the property line and incorporate it into his irrigation scheme. Back in 2004 I paid member Bearrr264 a little over $1,550 per acre for a section of dryland ground. I had the land recontoured and put a center-pivot on it. The cash rent on it is variable between $200 and $275 per acre depending on corn prices.

Yep, I'm about 90mi south of Chicago, and unless you're lucky enough to have inherited land, have relatives with it, or have extremely deep pockets for a lease, you are pretty much SOL for hunting around here anymore. Undeveloped acreage that was $1000-1500 an acre 15-20 years ago is $15,000+ around here now.

Kinda blew up my plans to buy a little piece after I paid the house off. Big city money coming down and buying it all up for retirement or getaway houses, then they clear off half the trees they just bought to plop a McMansion on it.