Fewer than half the people at a recent farm auction in Clinton County were actual bidders. The rest came for the cookies, conversation and to see who would walk away with 150 acres of Iowa dirt.
Would it be the men in suits sitting in folding chairs by the wall?
What about the old-timer in overalls?
Or would an online buyer swoop in with the highest bid?
“Folks, you don’t want to be driving past the farm and saying ‘I wish I would have bought it’ later down the road,” said Jesse Meyer, an auctioneer for the Peoples Company. “It’ll be another 50, 60, 70 years before this farm comes back on the open market.“
The sense that Iowa’s agricultural land is both scarce and gaining in value has driven the average price to a record-setting $11,400 per acre last year. Now Iowa farmers are bidding not only against neighbors, but out-of-state investors including professional athletes, well-known billionaires and the Mormon Church.
The Gazette spent four months searching county assessor records in all 99 counties, looking at maps and talking with land agents, farmers and investor owners to get a sense of who owns Iowa farmland. Here are some of our findings:
Despite Iowa’s farming heritage, more than half of Iowa farmland is owned by someone who doesn’t farm, according to the 2022 Farmland Tenure and Ownership survey by Iowa State University.
Nearly one-quarter of Iowa farmland owners in 2022 bought the acres as a long-term investment, ISU reported. High commodity prices have pushed up average cash rents, which further improves the investment potential.
⧉ Related article: Iowa’s farm owners getting older
“Iowa farmland is regarded very highly among the investors because those are the assets that don’t depreciate much,” said Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor at Cornell University who, until recently, was the lead researcher of ISU’s farmland ownership survey.
Because of these surveys, we know about Iowa landowners in general, but not by name. There’s no state database showing, for example, the top 10 largest Iowa landowners. People or companies that want to collect this information cobble together incomplete reports from county assessors, commercial websites and other sources.
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“We hear about major transactions via landowners themselves, their representatives, from brokers and appraisers, and, more recently, via online county tax records,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of The Land Report, which chronicles major land transactions and compiles an annual list of the country’s largest individual landowners.
What makes tracking land ownership even harder is some buyers don’t use their real names, instead buying under subsidiaries or shell companies. This secrecy hinders landowners from contacting neighbors and public officials struggle to make sure land isn’t being purchased illegally.
The Deseret Trust, an auxiliary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has owned Iowa farmland since at least 1982, a Gazette review shows. Since then, the trust has purchased at least 22,450 acres of Iowa farmland in 21 Iowa counties.
Buchanan County has the largest amount of land owned by the trust at 3,240 acres, followed by Webster at 3,106 and Benton at 2,091. The most recent sale tracked by The Gazette was on Feb. 15, when the trust bought about 160 acres in Tama County for $2.1 million, an average price of more than $13,000 per acre.
A Flourish map
The Utah-based church owned at least 1.7 million acres of land valued at nearly $16 billion across the United States in 2020, according to an analysis by the Truth & Transparency Foundation, a now-defunct nonprofit newsroom focused on religious accountability.
This land includes church grounds, apartment buildings, shopping complexes and agricultural land, according to a 2022 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. These holdings make the church one of the nation’s top private landowners, the Tribune reports.
One reason the church is able to buy so much land is an expectation members give 10 percent of their income to the church. After paying church bills, there is significant income left for investments, according to a former senior portfolio manager for Ensign Peak Advisors, another investment arm of the LDS church, who recently was interviewed by 60 Minutes.
The Deseret Trust declined The Gazette’s request for an interview about its agricultural land buys in Iowa, but provided a statement:
“We see farmland as a stable long-term investment,” Dale K. Bills, a spokesman for the trust, said in an email. “The land owned in Iowa is leased to and worked by local farmers. Because we want our farmland to be just as productive a hundred years from now as it is today, we encourage our tenants to employ sustainable best practices in tillage and nutrient management to maintain productivity and protect water resources.”
The Deseret Trust spent $23 million last November to buy about 1,800 acres of Lee County farmland. The church bought about 50 parcels near Wever, just south of the Iowa Fertilizer Co., a $3 billion fertilizer plant that employs 265 people full time and is owned by multinational firm OCI NV.
Steve Menke, who farms nearby, said he and other neighbors didn’t have an option to buy the land because it was sold without a public auction.
“You don’t get a chance,” he said.
www.thegazette.com
Would it be the men in suits sitting in folding chairs by the wall?
What about the old-timer in overalls?
Or would an online buyer swoop in with the highest bid?
“Folks, you don’t want to be driving past the farm and saying ‘I wish I would have bought it’ later down the road,” said Jesse Meyer, an auctioneer for the Peoples Company. “It’ll be another 50, 60, 70 years before this farm comes back on the open market.“
The sense that Iowa’s agricultural land is both scarce and gaining in value has driven the average price to a record-setting $11,400 per acre last year. Now Iowa farmers are bidding not only against neighbors, but out-of-state investors including professional athletes, well-known billionaires and the Mormon Church.
The Gazette spent four months searching county assessor records in all 99 counties, looking at maps and talking with land agents, farmers and investor owners to get a sense of who owns Iowa farmland. Here are some of our findings:
- An investing arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known to many Iowans as the Mormon Church, owns at least 22,000 acres of Iowa farm land. At the average per-acre price, that land is worth more than $250 million.
- Lee County land prices have shot up as developers and investors compete for land around the Iowa Fertilizer Co. “All these big investment groups want to jump on the bandwagon,” one Lee County farmer said.
- A Tennessee family has bought at least 5,000 acres of land in northwest Iowa using at least 10 different names.
- Iowa is one of only 21 states in the country that prohibits foreign land ownership, but still had nearly 600,000 acres of agricultural land in 2020 owned by people from other countries.
- Some investor owners, like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, make land and water conservation a priority, while others are not involved in how their land is managed.
Despite Iowa’s farming heritage, more than half of Iowa farmland is owned by someone who doesn’t farm, according to the 2022 Farmland Tenure and Ownership survey by Iowa State University.
Nearly one-quarter of Iowa farmland owners in 2022 bought the acres as a long-term investment, ISU reported. High commodity prices have pushed up average cash rents, which further improves the investment potential.
⧉ Related article: Iowa’s farm owners getting older
“Iowa farmland is regarded very highly among the investors because those are the assets that don’t depreciate much,” said Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor at Cornell University who, until recently, was the lead researcher of ISU’s farmland ownership survey.
Because of these surveys, we know about Iowa landowners in general, but not by name. There’s no state database showing, for example, the top 10 largest Iowa landowners. People or companies that want to collect this information cobble together incomplete reports from county assessors, commercial websites and other sources.
Advertisement
“We hear about major transactions via landowners themselves, their representatives, from brokers and appraisers, and, more recently, via online county tax records,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of The Land Report, which chronicles major land transactions and compiles an annual list of the country’s largest individual landowners.
What makes tracking land ownership even harder is some buyers don’t use their real names, instead buying under subsidiaries or shell companies. This secrecy hinders landowners from contacting neighbors and public officials struggle to make sure land isn’t being purchased illegally.
Mormon Church purchases go back to 1980s
The Deseret Trust, an auxiliary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has owned Iowa farmland since at least 1982, a Gazette review shows. Since then, the trust has purchased at least 22,450 acres of Iowa farmland in 21 Iowa counties.
Buchanan County has the largest amount of land owned by the trust at 3,240 acres, followed by Webster at 3,106 and Benton at 2,091. The most recent sale tracked by The Gazette was on Feb. 15, when the trust bought about 160 acres in Tama County for $2.1 million, an average price of more than $13,000 per acre.
A Flourish mapThe Utah-based church owned at least 1.7 million acres of land valued at nearly $16 billion across the United States in 2020, according to an analysis by the Truth & Transparency Foundation, a now-defunct nonprofit newsroom focused on religious accountability.
This land includes church grounds, apartment buildings, shopping complexes and agricultural land, according to a 2022 article in the Salt Lake Tribune. These holdings make the church one of the nation’s top private landowners, the Tribune reports.
One reason the church is able to buy so much land is an expectation members give 10 percent of their income to the church. After paying church bills, there is significant income left for investments, according to a former senior portfolio manager for Ensign Peak Advisors, another investment arm of the LDS church, who recently was interviewed by 60 Minutes.
The Deseret Trust declined The Gazette’s request for an interview about its agricultural land buys in Iowa, but provided a statement:
“We see farmland as a stable long-term investment,” Dale K. Bills, a spokesman for the trust, said in an email. “The land owned in Iowa is leased to and worked by local farmers. Because we want our farmland to be just as productive a hundred years from now as it is today, we encourage our tenants to employ sustainable best practices in tillage and nutrient management to maintain productivity and protect water resources.”
Lee County land prices skyrocket
The Deseret Trust spent $23 million last November to buy about 1,800 acres of Lee County farmland. The church bought about 50 parcels near Wever, just south of the Iowa Fertilizer Co., a $3 billion fertilizer plant that employs 265 people full time and is owned by multinational firm OCI NV.
Steve Menke, who farms nearby, said he and other neighbors didn’t have an option to buy the land because it was sold without a public auction.
“You don’t get a chance,” he said.
Who owns Iowa farmland? In many cases, it’s not farmers.
The sense Iowa’s agricultural land is both scarce and gaining value has driven the average price to a record-setting $11,400 per acre last year. Now Iowa farmers are bidding not only against neighbors, but out-of-state investors including professional athletes, well-known billionaires and the...
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