land rental

Corn and soybean farmers should plan for much lower market prices for their crops in the near term, given trends in the futures markets, said six analysts writing at the farmdoc daily blog. “We may be again entering a period of lower prices, like that from 2014 through 2019,” they said.

The continued decline in season-average corn and soybean prices since the peaks of 2022 will pinch farmer returns from the crops for the second year in a row, said three analysts writing at the farmdoc daily blog. They estimated that operator and land returns would fall below $300 an acre, levels last seen from 2014 to 2019.

Midwestern farmers will likely need large reductions in rental rates on cropland in 2019 to have a chance of making money on corn or soybeans, said economist Gary Schnitkey of the University of Illinois.

Farmland Partners Inc. says it has closed on a previously announced purchase of 22,100 acres of farmland near Paris in east-central Illinois in a deal valued at $197 million.

It took years for land-rental rates to rise during the agricultural boom, and now they are coming down much slower than commodity prices, which peaked in 2012, writes economist Gary Schnitkey of U-Illinois.

Bankers in a 10-state swath from Illinois and Iowa to Colorado and Wyoming "expect 2015 cash rents for farmland to decline to $214 per acre, down significantly from last year's $254," said Creighton University's Rural Mainstreet Index.