(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa State University Farmland value survey shows a record price once again, but the increase is less than last year. I-S-U’s Rabail Chandio oversees the survey, and says the average price for an acre is 11-thousand-835 dollars. “This is a three-point-seven percent (3.7%) increase from last year, and a 424-dollars increase from last year,” she says. The single digit increase comes after two straight years where land values went up by double-digits. “Last year, we saw an increase of 17 percent…, and before that the increase was 29 percent So we’re still seeing an increase, but it’s a lot more modest and has slowed down,” Chandio says. She says the current land value trend appears to be following what happened about ten years ago when land values rose, and then there were minor adjustments without a crash in the market.

“And we’re seeing kind of a similar thing here. Right now we’re seeing we were at a quite a high value during the last couple of years, which is decreasing. And we’re hoping again, that it won’t really crash but we’ll see a soft landing,” Chandio says, “as is happening in the broader economy, we avoided a recession we hope to see kind of same thing happen in the land markets.” Chandio says the slowdown led to one of the nine land districts seeing a drop in overall values for the first time in several years.

“This year the northwest (district) saw a decrease of zero-point-eight percent. All of the other crop reporting districts show and increase in the land values, with the highest being the south-central and the southeast at 12-point-eight percent and nine-point-six percent,” she says. Chandio says it appears the southern district was lagging a little behind the others in their increases, and that could be why they are showing the higher values in this report.