How can I add more value to my farmland? Top 50 Questions about Farmland

Hey, it's the Iowa land guy. And here's the top 50 questions that I get asked about farmland. So how can I add value to my farmland? Well, a couple of things, the biggest one and easiest one is add more acres. So how do we do that? If we buy an improvement farm that maybe has some, uh, what we'd consider waste ground that you can't farm it or can't till it, it might be a treed area or a wet.

or an area that, uh, just was not really good for farming, um, because of, uh, topography. We can do some things to change that. Topography, we can add terraces. If there's trees in the way, we can remove the trees, dozer them out of the way, have a burn pile, and, uh, um, till that area up and make it into now tillable soils.

I. e., add acres. Um, if it's a wet area, um, or a wet land, not necessarily a wet land, but a wet area that, um, didn't produce every year, we can add drain tile to the farm, or drainage tile to get the water away from the farm, which in tune gives us more acres. So how do we add value to a farm? Get more acres.

Okay? What else could we do? If there was a property, uh, maybe an old farmhouse. It might be worth us, as the seller, to tear that old farmhouse down prior to selling it. And that, uh, cleans up any, uh, questions about the farm. Where's the septic? Is it removed? And what did we do in the meantime? We added more acres to the farm.

Remember that, uh, Iowa Farm Ground is, uh, production agriculture. So the more we can produce, the more value we have. Now, if we're selling a farm in Colorado or Montana, Um, we might like those outbuildings, we might like the trees, um, we might like the huntability of it. Um, so every property is a little different, but remember in Iowa, some of the highest ground that's selling is production agriculture.

So think like a producer. They want to bid on acres that are in production. So how do we add more value? Add more production value.

David Whitaker | Iowa Land Guy