Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on Money, how it

works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David

Stein, today is episode 334. It's titled, Should You Invest in Farmland? About 10 years

ago, LaPrile and I bought an 80 acre farm in Teton Valley. It was a beautiful location.

I have mentioned this farm in the past on the podcast as well as in my book. Some of

the challenges that we've had with it, particularly the gravel pit that sprung up across the street.

I sold half the farm, all the outbuildings, the pastures, the house in 2016, broke even,

and then kept 40 acres, which we've held for the past five years. I make a little bit

of income on it, not much, about $15 per acre, to lease it to a local farmer that I know

that first had planted barley on it and then in the last several years has planted hay.

My yield is about 0.5%. I like owning this piece of land because I don't have to do anything.

The taxes are low, the farmer farms it. Yeah, I don't make much money off of it, but the

idea was to eventually sell it as property prices go up, not because farm income is going

up, because typically farmland goes up in value if farm income is going up. But in this

valley that overlooks the Teton mountain range, there have been a lot of people wanting

to buy property there in the last year as the pandemic hit. And there's a shortage of

supply. I got a call last week that the owner that bought our farm and I've been carrying

the note on it is ready to sell and wanted to know if I wanted to list our property

for sale. I said, sure, because prices have doubled from my cost in this particular piece

of ground. Now, that's just one way to go about farmland investing. You could call it

a higher and better use way. The true value is in the speculative land prices, not from

farmers, but from others that want to move to a beautiful valley. There are other ways

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