AgLetter: February 1998
District farmland values registered a large gain again last
year, according to the responses of over 350 agricultural
banks recently surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago. The bankers indicated that the value of good
farmland, on average, rose more than 2 percent during
the final three months of 1997. The rise for all of 1997
was nearly 10 percent, duplicating the strong gain of the
year before. Adjusted for the moderating inflationary
pressures, last year’s rise translated into the steepest real
increase in farmland values in almost twenty years.
