Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The concept of farmland being "for sale" at all seems bizarre. This isn't someone's home. Raw land is effectively always for sale, just contact the owner and make an unsolicited offer.

Is this just a psychological issue of people being attached to certain parcels or is there some other factor?

View on HN

I'm guessing you didn't grow up on a farm.

There will always be some farmland effectively for sale; but there will also be other farmland which will never be for sale, no matter what the cost. The latter are generally "homeplaces", which have been in the family for generations. Heritage, blood, sweat, and years of hard work bind you to the soil, the land. It's more than an emotional attachment--it's almost spiritual, almost core identity.

It's an essential part of you and who you are.

Beautifully said.

It is amazing to see the effect of this in the wild - the land owns the people and it is basically impossible to sell. I have seen people who own land worth 10s of million of dollars live like paupers because they are so tied to the land.

I have wondered how much this effect is genetically built into us - there really is something different about how people view farmland compared to every other asset.

Farmland is essentially a complete livelihood, whereas other land is just a place to park a house.

Or a wind turbine.

Yes, but so is a business and it doesn't seem to induce the same type of ownership.

To be honest, I'm willing to bet that the sense of history you get with a multi-generational family farm, probably is matched in other multi-generational family businesses as well.

(However, most businesses don't have the option of the ultimate fallback of subsistence farming if times got really rough. :) )

A business supplies you with currency to trade for the basic necessities. A farm can provide those directly.

You can make an unsolicited offer to homeowners too. In both cases, something being "not for sale" means the price should be higher because there are large transition costs with unexpected moves.

No way. Land has low carrying cost and people will sit on it for years to speculate or hold neighbors hostage.

Part of this is that a lot of states have agricultural exemptions or lower rates for farmland. Even if it's not effectively farmed. Or McMansions in the countryside exploiting the same law via what my dad called "Noah's Ark farms" (just two of every animal).

So yes, if you want to game the system and sit on land, there's little tax incentive to sell it.

In the UK this is doubly true, because you also receive your subsidy from the EU for owning that land. In fact in many ways farming it less efficiently gets you more as you can qualify for environmental uplifts for using less fertilizer and keeping bigger headlands and hedges.

It's worth metioning that this distribution system is decided by the UK government (or possibly Eng/Scot etc governements). The EU allocates subsidy to the member nations according to one system (not accounting for e.g. bigger hedges), which allocate subsidy to farmer/business according to their own system. It is entirely possible for the UK government, within the EU, to allocate money to farms as an insurance system against bad years, or to encourage profitability at all costs, or in another way.

In theory, does land appreciate at the risk-free rate? Or does holding land mean that you lose the opportunity cost of what you could have otherwise done with the money?

No, there is lots of risk in land, particularly if you borrow money to buy it!

People have different risk evaluation and time horizons. If you are sitting on a lot of capital, it’s a no brainer to buy land when financial bubbles pop and leveraged owners need to unload cheap.

Not only do you have a long term inflation hedge, but it’s real property, which means you can borrow against it to get cash without paying taxes via dividends or sale.

Iowa is great for investors like this because the whole state is just a big corn factory. The government tries to keep commodity prices less volatile, so you can project lease income with some precision using the value of corn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com