Peoples Perspective

As America faces a massive farmland transition, Peoples Company releases a powerful play, video, and guide to help landowners navigate inheritance and preserve their legacy.

While farmland value is primarily driven by land quality, water rights, and production potential, agribusiness assets are valued based on operational efficiency and EBITDA performance, with technology, processing capacity, and supply chain management playing key roles.

I was raised outside Boulder, Colorado, near the mountains but far removed from large-scale production agriculture. Still, I developed a passion for the agricultural industry early on—riding horses and raising livestock on my family’s small acreage.

The appraisal team at Peoples Company was able to track 62 tracts or 5,934 acres sold at public auction in Iowa during June 2025. The average dollar per acre was $11,129, the average dollar per tillable acre was $13,003, and the average dollar per CSR2 was $159.

Peoples Company tracks agricultural auctions across the state of Iowa. From this data, we calculate the average dollar per CSR2 point ($/CSR2) for sales of tracts with greater than 85% tillable land. Additionally, these tracts are largely unimproved or include minimal improvement contribution.

As solar energy expands across rural America, landowners are increasingly receiving enticing offers to lease their land for solar development.

If you or your organization owns mineral rights—whether inherited, gifted, or acquired—there’s a chance you could be missing out on revenue that’s rightfully yours. Over time, oil and gas royalties can become “unclaimed” due to address changes, unclear title, estate issues, or simple clerical errors. In many cases, those funds are turned over to state agencies as unclaimed property.

In farm and rural real estate appraisal, it is essential to understand that the aggregated value of a property is not always equal to the disaggregated value of its parts.

Commodity markets have not been kind to agricultural producers and landowners so far in 2025.

Peoples Company Energy Management hosted a webinar on Thursday, June 26, 2025, with special guest speakers Ethan McMillan, Attorney at Law, Kevin Boone, Co-Founder of Dixie Lake Royalty, and Charlus Bishop, Founder of Mid-Continent Energy Exchange. This session focuses on the Do's and Don'ts of Buying and Selling Mineral Rights.