The USDA’s new rental survey also teased out what is increasingly becoming a barrier for beginning farmers who need land to get started. In the next five years, 10 percent of continental farmland in the U.S. — 91.5 million acres — is slated for ownership transfer. But only 21 million acres of that land will be sold outside the families that own it, according to the 2014 Tenure, Ownership, and Transition of Agricultural Land (TOTAL) survey.
The rest? “Farmland has always been a valuable resource, but what we see in the most recent TOTAL results is the emergence of farmland as a future investment,” said Joseph T. Reilly, who runs the USDA’s national agricultural statistics service. “More families are creating trust ownerships to make sure land remains in their family for farming or as an investment.”
Mary Bohman, of the USDA’s Economic Research Service, said access to land is “one of the biggest challenges facing agricultural producers, particularly beginning farmers.”