Profitability Pressures Kansas Land Values

Kansas farmland prices continue to march steadily downward, and there's little in the economic forecast to reverse the trend. "All of the numbers are pointing down, but it’s not falling off a cliff," Kansas State University farm management specialist Mykel Taylor said about near-term price movements in a press release. The USDA said overall values to declined 3.9% to an average of $1,970 per acre last year, and that trend is likely to continue.Kansas is a non-disclosure state, so Taylor uses data from the Kansas Property Valuation Division of the state's revenue department to make her estimates, which show sharper declines than data used by USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service. For example, USDA says that since 2014, irrigated land prices have fallen 13.1%; dryland values, 13%; and pasture values, 7.9%. Taylor's data suggests it's more like 17.4% for irrigated, 19% for dryland and 21.4% for pastureland.