Potential Tax Changes Push Farm Sales

Des Moines Register:

But pressure is intense to sell land before Jan. 1 when, if Congress doesn’t intervene, capital gains taxes will rise from 15 percent to 23.8 percent and deductions on estate taxes will drop from $5 million to $1 million.
“If there is a chance that you may want to sell your farm, then you should think hard about getting it done before the end of 2012,” said Des Moines lawyer Bill Hannigan of the Davis Brown firm.
On the front lines of Iowa’s farmland boom, farmers and landowners are filing into small-town meeting halls for auctions with one eye on the tax debate in Washington.
“The tax changes are on everybody’s minds. We have a sale every day, except Sundays, between now and Thankgiving,” regional sales manager Sam Kain of Farmers National Co. said before selling 169 acres of Bremer County farmland from the estate of Alvin and Maxine Walther on the day before the election.
“I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve never seen it this busy,” Kain said.
The extra inventory of land sales hasn’t cooled off Iowa’s hyperheated farmland boom. In October the state set a record price of $21,900 per acre in Sioux County.

There are a lot of recent sale details in the article.  A lot of farms bought for a couple hundred dollars an acre 60 years ago are selling for 15 thousand an acre now.

There is a farm next to us selling on Tuesday.  I've got to decide how high I'll be willing to go when bidding.  While I believe that land prices are getting bubbly, if I can get this at a relatively reasonable price, I'll do it.  And the scale for reasonable has shifted more than I would like to admit.  A good sign that there is a bubble is this, from the same article:

The high prices paid for Iowa farmland inevitably conjure up memories of the extended Great Depression in agriculture during the 1920s and ’30s and the farm crisis of the 1980s.
As rural prophets warn constantly, both of those calamities were preceded by the same kind of commodity and land price boom that Iowa has enjoyed since the middle of the last decade. But others point out that this time is different (emphasis mine), in part because corn prices are above $7 per bushel and expected to stay there, if the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast is to be believed.
“The price of corn is high and interest rates low and there is a shortage of alternative investment,” Kain said.

It is never good when that appears, because this time is never different.