No online tool can price your farm, and the best known one will not even try. Zillow states plainly that the Zestimate covers residential property only and that vacant land is not eligible. The tools that do return a number for farmland are working from county averages and assessor records, not from what comparable ground actually brought at auction. That gap is not small. USDA put the 2025 average value of U.S. cropland at $5,830 an acre. Iowa cropland averaged $10,300. On a 160-acre farm, pricing off the national number instead of the Iowa number is a $715,000 mistake. What your farm is worth comes down to its soil rating, its tile, its FSA acres, its lease status, and what the neighbors paid last winter. No algorithm has all five.
Key takeaways
- Zillow does not produce a Zestimate for farmland. Vacant land is not eligible, by Zillow’s own rules.
- The 2025 U.S. cropland average of $5,830 an acre is nothing like Iowa’s $10,300. A model trained on national data will miss your farm badly.
- CSR2 moves the price of Iowa ground more than any other single factor, and no national tool reads it.
- Tile, FSA base acres, CRP contracts, and lease status all change the number, and none of them show up in an aerial photo.
- An online estimate is fine for curiosity. It is not fine for setting a reserve, settling an estate, or dividing ground among heirs.
Why do online tools struggle with farmland?
An automated valuation model needs three things: a lot of recent sales, properties that resemble each other, and public records that describe them accurately. Suburban housing gives it all three. Farmland gives it none.
Start with volume. A subdivision might turn over dozens of nearly identical houses in a year. A township might see three farms change hands, and one of those was a family transfer at a number that means nothing to the open market. Then look at similarity. Two houses on the same street differ by a finished basement. Two quarters in the same section can differ by twenty points of soil rating, a tile system on one and none on the other, and a lease that ties one up through next fall.
Zillow does not pretend otherwise. Its own documentation says the Zestimate is available for residential properties only, and that vacant land and commercial property are not eligible. The most recognized valuation tool in the country looks at your farm and declines to guess. The tools that do hand you a number are not working from better data. They are just more willing to be wrong.
What does a national average actually tell you?
Very little, and this is where most online estimates get their footing.
USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that farm real estate averaged $4,350 an acre nationally in 2025, up 4.3%, and made up 83.6% of all U.S. farm assets. Good numbers, honestly collected, and useless for pricing a farm near Spencer. Across the country the state averages ran from about $725 an acre in New Mexico to $22,500 in Rhode Island. Inside the Corn Belt alone, cropland ran from $5,150 in Missouri to $10,300 in Iowa.
There is a detail in how that number is built that most people never see. USDA’s figure is not derived from sale prices at all. It comes from an annual producer survey, where operators report what they believe their land is worth. It is a solid indicator of which direction the market is moving. It was never built to price your eighty.
Why does CSR2 move the number more than anything else?
CSR2, the Corn Suitability Rating Iowa uses to score productivity on a roughly 100-point scale, drives the price of tillable ground more than any other single factor. Here is what that looks like in dollars.
This spring we sold a 75-acre Clay County farm at public auction for $15,600 an acre, as reported by DTN Progressive Farmer. It carried a 94.8 CSR2 and was 100% tillable. Earlier in the year a 143-acre Webster County farm at an 86.1 rating brought $12,600. Call it nine points of soil rating and a $3,000 an acre spread. Two Iowa farms, both tillable, both sold at auction inside a few months of each other.
Any model averaging recent county sales lands somewhere between those two numbers and is wrong on both. Split the difference at $14,100 and you have underpriced the Clay County farm by $1,500 an acre. On 75 acres that is $112,500 the owner never sees.
What do the algorithms miss on a farm?
Soil rating is the biggest input, and it is far from the only factor that moves farmland value. Here is what an automated model cannot see:
- Tile. Pattern tile is invisible from the air and worth real money per acre. Nobody records it anywhere a model can find.
- FSA crop acres versus deeded acres. The fence line and the deed rarely agree. Buyers pay for tillable acres, not paper acres.
- Base acres and PLC yields. They travel with the farm and factor into what an operator will pay.
- CRP contracts and expiration dates. A contract running out next September is a different asset than one with six years left.
- Lease status. Open for the next crop year, or tied up through fall. This alone can swing a bid.
- Waterways, terraces, and building sites that sit in the tax record as acres but do not grow a bushel.
- Access. A hard-surface road on two sides is worth more than a minimum maintenance road on one.
- Whether it should sell in tracts. A half section offered in pieces often beats the same ground offered whole, and no estimate accounts for how you take it to market.
Are the county numbers any better?
Better, and still not a price for your farm.
The 2025 Iowa State University Land Value Survey put the state average at $11,549 an acre, up 0.7%, which is a decline of 1.8% once you adjust for inflation. The spread underneath that average is the real story. O’Brien County came in highest in Iowa at $16,269 an acre. Appanoose County came in lowest at $6,679. That is two and a half times, inside one state, in the same year.
Northwest Iowa led the state, which is worth knowing if you own ground here and read somewhere that Iowa land values are falling. In 2024 they were. In 2025 the middle of the state fell while this corner rose.
One more thing about those county figures, straight from ISU: only the state and district averages come directly from survey responses. County estimates are derived by combining survey results with USDA data. Even the best Iowa number available for your county is a modeled figure, not a comp.
When is an online estimate good enough?
An expert can afford to be straight about this. Online estimates have a use. If you inherited ground three states away and want to know whether you are looking at a $200,000 asset or a $2 million one before you make a phone call, a rough number helps. Order of magnitude, sanity check, starting point for a conversation. Fine.
Where it stops being fine is any decision with a signature on it. Setting a reserve. Filing an estate inventory. Dividing ground among three siblings who all have to feel it was fair. Identifying replacement property on a 1031 clock. Funding a buy-sell agreement. Take an algorithm’s guess into any of those and you are going to be wrong by a number that matters, in a direction you cannot predict.
Know which document you actually need, too. A certified appraisal and a broker’s opinion of value are different jobs. If a lender, a court, or the IRS wants a number, you need a licensed appraiser and a formal report. If you want to know what your farm would bring on the open market this fall, you want somebody who sells this ground for a living. Do not pay for the first when you need the second.
What does a real farm evaluation look like?
We walk it. We pull the soil map and the CSR2, check the FSA acres, base acres and any CRP contract, look at the tile records and the lease, and set the farm against recent sales from our land values database rather than a county average. Then you get a straight number and the reasoning behind it, including whether the ground would do better at auction, by private treaty, or in tracts.
Our team has been selling and managing farmland out of Spencer since 1988, across Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. Travis Johnson holds the Accredited Farm Manager designation from the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers, and we manage more than 40,000 acres, which means we see what ground actually produces and what it actually rents for. That is the difference between an opinion and a guess. You can also see our past sale results and judge for yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get a Zestimate on my farmland?
No. Zillow limits the Zestimate to residential property and excludes vacant land, so farm ground does not get one. Any farmland number you find online comes from a different tool working mostly off assessor records and county averages.
What is the difference between an appraisal and a broker’s price opinion?
A certified appraisal is a formal report prepared by a licensed appraiser to professional standards, and it is what lenders, courts, and tax authorities require. A broker’s price opinion is a market opinion from someone who buys and sells that type of property, aimed at what the farm would actually bring. Different documents for different purposes, and the cheaper one is often the one you need.
Can I use my county assessor’s value?
Not for a sale decision. Assessed value exists to allocate property tax, follows its own cycle and formulas, and commonly sits well off market value in either direction. It is a tax figure, not a price.
What does a farm evaluation cost?
Ours is free and carries no obligation. We would rather have an accurate number in front of you than have you make a decision off a screen, whether or not you ever list the farm with us.
Find out what your farm is actually worth
You would not price a farm off a website any more than you would buy one sight unseen. Request a free, no obligation evaluation of your farm, or contact us and we will tell you what your ground should bring and exactly how we got there.