April 29, 2024

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Acres was created as a platform to support a more transparent and efficient land market by providing users with the information needed to make confident decisions about buying, listing, or farmland investment transactions by combining weekly market intelligence, parcel-level data, and research tools on a single platform for web and mobile use. 

By becoming a part of Acres’ growing network, users can unlock rural land insights, ownership information, nationwide land sales data (including in non-disclosure and partial disclosure states), and gain key layered insight about what can’t be seen on the ground such as crop history, vegetation and timber site indices, soil maps, county rent and yield records, elevation and topography, GSA and water district level information, power grid background, and flood history. Users can also showcase properties and share these insights via customizable PDF reports featuring their brand. 

This introduction is not only to familiarize you with Acres and what they can accomplish for their partners, but to demonstrate just how the company is a valuable source of unrivaled data, analysis, and thought leadership for those in the ag investing space.

Luckily for us, Acres’ insights are being made available through a series of nationwide-scale, regional reports. Correlating with Acres’ previous Heartland Report, the firm is now offering actionable insights on one of the richest and most high-demand farmland markets in the country through their report, California Farmland Values: A Data-Driven Analysis, which is available to access here.

Concentrating on data from 2018 – Q4 2023, this report explores a range of aspects that together comprise a complete view of the California farmland market. For example, it addresses the total number and value of permanent cropland sales by quarter and by crop; examines the significant spikes seen in both transaction volume and price per acre 2020 and 2021; and explores the volatility in 2023 annual cropland sales by volume in millions of dollars, and a spike seen at the end of 2021. Telling the story behind the numbers, Acres posits this happened as a result of bare ground, or open-option ground, being bought to be planted in permanent crops, demonstrating a high level of correlation and conversion between permanent and annual cropland

“I think this continues to highlight how permanent crop sales are going to drive the value of the land,” said Aaron Shaw, director of data science, Acres. “In general, if you see prices or sales volumes of permanent crops go up, you’re going to see annual crops follow that.”

Acres also conducts a ground-level view of permanent crop sales across California on a water district-basis by crop type and by county. By asking themselves the question, “How much does water matter across the board?”, Acres zeroed in on almond sales in water districts, comparing them to sales outside those water districts, or in areas they refer to as “white space”, coming to an interesting conclusion that is much more deeply discussed in their report. 

They also dive into change in price-per-acre by crop, offering a broad perspective on what’s happening on a regional scale, sparking further questions for discussion, and forecasting trends to watch in early 2024 for the California farmland market. 

To be one of the first to access these insights and much more, you can access Acres’ California Farmland Values: A Data-Driven Analysis report here. 

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and Agtech Intel News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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