The average value of farmland jumped 25 percent over last year just in the third quarter of this year. This report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City came from a survey of 243 banks in the region. The annual increase was the greatest in the 27 years that the survey has been taken.
Higher farmland prices aren’t all good. The cost of becoming a farmer already was astronomical. With every $100 the price of an acre rises, the barrier to starting a career on the land rises another notch.
Established farmers, though, can feel a sense of security as the value of their basic investment rises. High-priced farmland brings a well-financed retirement within reach and can make it possible for one generation to move over and make room for the next.
High prices — fair prices, a farmer would say — for farm products are the foundation for higher land prices and it is immensely encouraging to the people of the Great Plains that ag prices have been so strong in the middle of the worse recession since the 1930s. In the Great Depression corn was sometimes burned as fuel because it wasn’t worth carrying to market. Today, corn is gold in more than color.
There are sound reasons to expect farming to be profitable well into the future. The world’s population now brings more than 7 billion mouths and bellies to the table every day.
Kansas and its fellow ag states can prosper by helping to fill those bellies.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
