Farmers Split on Land Values: Bullish for the Long Haul, Bracing for the Short Term

The Ag Economy Barometer is a monthly telephone survey of 400 U.S. farmers, conducted by Purdue University's Center for Commercial Agriculture in partnership with CME Group and published continuously since 2015. Respondents are producers with at least $500,000 in annual market value of production, and the index is built from their answers about current conditions and future expectations. The June 2026 edition was conducted during the survey window of June 15–19, 2026 and released on July 7, 2026.

Sentiment moved down in two steps. In May, the headline barometer eased from 121 to 119 — a modest, largely unremarkable decline. In June it dropped another 6 points to 113. The Current Conditions Index, which measures how producers rate the present rather than the future, fell to 102, an 18-month low.

What makes the June reading worth a closer look is that the land questions did not move in the same direction. Purdue asks separately about the next 12 months and about the next 10 to 15 years, and in June those two answers diverged: near-term expectations pulled back while long-term expectations reached the top of the survey's historical range. That gap is the story.

Cost pressure dominates the June responses. 42% of respondents named high input costs as the top factor limiting improvement in their farm's financial condition — down slightly from 46% who cited it in a related question the prior month, but still the single largest category by a wide margin. Fertilizer, fuel, chemistry and machinery parts all feed that answer.

The read on the present is thinner still. Only 12% of producers said their farm was better off financially than it had been a year earlier. That is the kind of number that shows up first in spending decisions rather than in headlines.

And it did. The Farm Capital Investment Index — Purdue's measure of whether producers think now is a good time to make large purchases such as machinery, buildings or additional ground — fell to 40 in June, its lowest reading since September 2024. When the marginal buyer of an adjoining 80 acres is also the operator postponing a combine trade, near-term land demand softens with it. The Short-Term Farmland Value Expectations Index moved accordingly, from 130 in May to 124 in June.

Against that near-term caution, the Long-Term Farmland Value Expectations Index rose to 166 in June, tying its all-time survey record. Producers who said they expect to trade less machinery and buy fewer acres this year also said they expect farmland to be worth more a decade from now than it is today.

Purdue asks respondents to identify what is driving that long-run view, and the same three factors led the list in both May and June: alternative investments — land judged against stocks and bonds, and valued as an inflation hedge; net farm income expectations over a longer horizon; and inflation itself.

"A lot of guys who wouldn't touch another acre this spring will still tell you they'd never sell what they've got," said one Kansas landowner, in comments echoing sentiment captured in a parallel regional survey.

That distinction — reluctance to buy is not the same as willingness to sell — is what keeps supply tight even in a soft-sentiment year. Thin listing volume tends to hold prices firmer than the sentiment index alone would suggest.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Q1 2026 Ag Credit Survey, published May 22, 2026, puts hard regional numbers behind the split. Across the Tenth Federal Reserve District — Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, northern New Mexico and western Missouri — ranchland values rose nearly 11% year-over-year to new record highs. Non-irrigated cropland rose roughly 2.5% and irrigated cropland roughly 4% over the same span.

Strong cattle prices are doing most of that work. Grazing capacity prices off the value of the calves it can carry, and the herd-rebuilding cycle has kept demand for pasture and rangeland well ahead of the row-crop side. The same dynamic is visible outside the Tenth District — including across Texas ranch country, where grazing ground and cropland have not been moving at the same speed.

Cropland producers are working with narrower margins, continued uncertainty on fertilizer and fuel, and modestly rising loan demand. In the same Kansas City Fed survey, about 20% of borrowers reported more carryover debt than a year earlier — an early, if not alarming, signal of tighter farm-level cash flow.

The barometer's five-year outlook question makes the divergence explicit. In the June survey, 25% of respondents expected "good times" for crop producers over the next five years, compared with 68% for livestock producers — the widest sector split the barometer has recorded in recent readings.

For landowners, that gap translates fairly directly. A cropland seller is marketing into a buyer pool that is more cautious than it was in the spring, financing more carefully and pricing off tighter projected margins. A pasture or ranchland seller is marketing into record valuations and a buyer set with strong current cash flow.

It also complicates any single national number. The 2025 USDA NASS figures — $4,350 per acre for all farm real estate, $5,830 for cropland, $1,920 for pasture — remain the most recent confirmed national benchmarks, and they were already averaging across two markets moving in different directions. No 2026 NASS land values figure has been published as of this writing.

The next Ag Economy Barometer release, covering July 2026 data, is expected in early August 2026. It will show whether the gap between short-term and long-term farmland value expectations widens or closes — and whether the Current Conditions Index stabilizes after June's 18-month low.

The USDA's next full Land Values report covering the 2026 crop year is not expected until August 2027. Until then, the regional Federal Reserve Ag Credit Surveys — Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Minneapolis — publish quarterly and will be the more current interim signal on what ground is actually trading for.

Anyone weighing a 2026 sale should read those regional surveys alongside the barometer rather than waiting on a national annual figure that will arrive a year after the fact.