The drop was blamed on a “swing in commodity prices,” Roger Hayworth, area sales manager, said in a Farmers National Co. release.
The average prices paid per acre for “high quality” farm land in Michigan from June 2015 to June 2016 declined $100; in Indiana by $500; in Illinois by $600; and Mississippi by $100, the company said.
Missouri saw a slight uptick of $200 per acre and Tennessee saw $150; prices paid per acre in Kentucky and Arkansas remained steady from last June, the survey said.
“There remained buyers with residual income from those high commodity price years with a continuous need for cropland acres, so the purchasing of land was led by their profitable years,” Hayworth said. “Today, there remain buyers, but they’re cautious.”
Less than two years ago, the story was very different.
The appraised value of farmland had skyrocketed in Montgomery County and 40 other counties that had conducted reappraisals or valuation updates, the Dayton Daily News reported in October 2014.
In Montgomery County, one of 13 counties that conducted a full reappraisal of all properties, farmland values more than doubled at that time from a previous update in 2011 — from a median value of $1,438 per acre in 2011 to $3,207 per acre in 2014, according to a newspaper analysis of 2014 reappraisal data from Montgomery County Auditor Karl Keith’s office.
While commodity prices have had a significant impact on land values, location and quality remain major influencers on land values, Farmers National said.
Farmers National Co. calls itself the the nation’s leading agricultural landowner services company. The company manages more than 4,850 farms in 24 states comprising more than 2.1 million acres.
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