Land availability in our area has been low for quite a while. Now, with a flurry of activity, I wonder if that is starting to change.

Recently, there have been two local land auctions. One farm brought around $5000 per acre, while the other was over $10,000. We didn’t attend either sale as our interest level in these tracts was rather low. They just weren’t located in any of our target areas.

The first farm was located just south of Plymouth. It can be a droughty field, located beside a gravel pit, it’s probably a class ‘C’ farm. The second farm was located north of us in southern St. Joe County. I’m not personally familiar with the farm, but it was described to me as a class ‘B’ type farm.  Based on sale price, I would say that farm is located in the transitional area between the hot bed of high priced land in eastern St Joe and Elkhart counties, and the more ‘reasonably’ priced land in western St Joe County. I would attribute the biggest difference in price between these farms to location.

There has also been a public-private party listing that was posted on Facebook and the bulletin boards at the local ag dealerships. One of the three parcels has been sold. The asking price was $7,500 per acre. As of last week, the other two parcels were still available, they may be a harder sale as the quality isn’t quite as good. There are also power line towers through one of the remaining tracts. One other private sale that I’m aware of appears to be in the $7,000 range. Both of these farms are class ‘B’ farms. We don’t have very many ‘A’ farms in our area.

Last week, an auction sign popped up just down the road. This will be the closest sale to us in quite a while. Now that harvest is over, we are evaluating our interest. I can tell you the pieces are not flat-black soil, some of what is flat and black can be at risk of high water. The auction is next month; we will see how things go. It can’t get much closer though…

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.