- "Right now, over 80% of the farmland in the country is owned by somebody 55 or older, and roughly half of [them are] 75 or older," Muth says. "We're going to have an incredible shift in value over the next five to 20 years."
Farmland has become steadily more expensive, and the pool of farmers and their heirs who can afford to buy it is shrinking. Yet there's a growing appetite for it among investors, including pension funds and wealthy individuals like Williams. One large group of pension funds says that its members now own almost three times more farm properties than a decade ago. The market value of those holdings has quintupled.
I don't think selling out is the obvious choice because it's the right choice, I think selling out seems like the obvious choice because so many people are getting backed into a corner. What the right choice is, well I dunno. I do know though, that corporate farms, have a detrimental effect in communities where they exist. Less jobs, lower wages, more financial insecurity, more environmental degradation, on and on it goes. If I owned farmland? I'd own it until my dying breath and well before then, make sure I'd find a good steward to own it well after I'm gone. I also know this though, this whole trend of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy looking at turning anything and everything into a speculative instrument is getting kind of tiring. Hubski in general and kleinbl00 in particular has heard my rants before, over the years, so I spared him my usual song and dance in his rent thread about maybe we wouldn't have anywhere near as big of a rent crisis right now if people didn't treat real estate as money printing machines. But this nonsense of snatching up and turning over land and property, businesses, over valued stocks, and on and on, in search of wealth, has gotta stop. It's killing us. I mean, we're turning nursing homes into speculative instruments. At this point, I can't really imagine how we can go much lower from here. Do I have any good answers? No. But I'm sure others do, and shrugging our shoulders probably isn't part of the formula.
