This aerial photo from the Brock Auction Company shows a piece of land in Plymouth County sold at auction Monday for a record $26,250 an acre.
REMSON, Iowa. Fertile farmland in Plymouth County set a state record this week at $26,250 an acre.
Land between Remson and Marcus, Iowa, was auctioned off Monday. Bidding takes 15 or 20 minutes, auctioneer Bruce R. Brock said. Three bidders raised the price to $25,000 before two bidders raised the price to $26,250 a minute or two before the hammer fell.
The total value of the 55.56 acres was over $1.458 million, according to Bullock. The price per acre is considered a record in Iowa. The buyers are local farmers.
According to Bullock, the seller is John Fiscus, who lives near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The somewhat non-standard acreage on sale (farmland is usually sold in quarters, 160 acres, or half-quarters, 80 acres) is a result of the allocation of farmland to family members over time.
“That’s why it’s a strange shape, it’s just distributed among some family members,” Bullock said.
Since the land has no other use than agriculture, the price is even more significant. There are no income-generating wind turbines on the land, and the property is too far from any city to be suitable for residential or commercial development.
“Just pure farmland,” Bullock said. (Brock’s website describes the land as “fertile and powerful.”)
This is not the first time Plymouth County farmland has been auctioned this year. In May, 96.33 acres of farmland, including a 3.67-acre farm southeast of Le Mars, sold for more than $2.6 million.
Many farmers in northwest Iowa are relatively wealthy, says Jim Rothermitch, vice president of Iowa Appraisal, a Des Moines commercial and agricultural real estate appraiser. Because of this, they can afford to pay higher prices for their farmland even as interest rates rise.
“There are a lot of people with strong cash positions, especially in northwest Iowa,” Rothermitch said by phone. “People have very strong stock positions.”
The fertile and productive farmland in Plymouth, O’Brien, and Soo counties, adjacent to ethanol plants and livestock farms, has long been one of Iowa’s most valuable farmlands.
According to data compiled by Rothermich, the top 10 farmland prices in Iowa are in Plymouth, Sue or O’Brien, all of which have been sold within the past two years – with eight records set this year alone.
The value of agricultural land in these three counties has risen sharply in recent years. Between 2020 and 2021, average farmland in Plymouth County increased by 31.4 percent to $12,416 per acre, according to Iowa State University’s Extension and Extension.
This lighting figure uses two elements from the history of the barn. The lamps are hung with original ropes on the barn door. The frame of the lamp is made of a pitchfork, on which Diana placed the lighting equipment.
During the renovation project, the original posts and beams were left in place. Once, when the closet was removed, two 2×12 were added to give the ceiling strength.
The deck on the west side of the barn overlooks Finrance’s cornfields, which has an open rectangle this year and no corn this year. The reason is that Kevin and Diane’s youngest daughter, Kate, is getting married to De’Anthony Zanders this October and wants to get married in the cornfields. Kevin missed planting a rectangular area, which he planted with grass. Because of this, he cannot use herbicides on the 12 rows bordering the plot. He had to work the corn by hand and pull the weeds by hand. The wedding reception will take place in the barn, and the dance in the hayloft. Their other children Grant, Hailey and Kerry also spent part of their wedding celebration in the barn.
This photograph of Kevin’s great-grandparents, Patrick and Bridget Finn, hangs on the barn wall. They immigrated from Ireland and were among the pioneers in Crawford County.
Adorning the closet are four generations of photographs of Diane as a baby, her mother, Dolores Scherner, grandmother Edna Gris, and great-grandmother Mary Remus.
Finerance found this rustic door with original hinges in the dirt. He is over 100 years old. Sliding door bearings frozen. Kevin soaked the bearings in diesel for about a month and then loosened them. “I don’t know why it didn’t rot,” Kevin said of the door, which was covered in dirt. “All we did was clean it up and Diana sealed it.”
The space where this window is installed has two large sliding doors that allow livestock to enter the barn. Finerance found a window in a junkyard in Omaha. “It’s shaped like a barn,” Kevin said. “We think it’s a great fit here.”
Elliot Fineran is sitting at one of Grandma Diana’s quilting tables, reading a book on quilting.
Another hobby of Diane’s is picking up puzzle pieces, supporting them with masonite, and placing barn frames around them. She especially took up this hobby during the pandemic. One of the puzzles is in the foreground and a blanket is used as a wall decoration in the back.
The door to this closet is in Diana’s kitchen pantry in Holstein’s house. She took the door to Devon Evers with Crossgrain Woodworking and he made the cabinet to match the door. The doors were originally wooden. “I wanted to add barbed wire behind it to make it look more vintage,” Diane says. The barbed wire provided a relatively unobstructed view of the blanket she kept in the closet.
One piece of furniture in the quilted half of the barn is a Hoosier closet that belonged to Diana’s mother.
The photo shows the original staircase leading to the barn door. The bottom part is cut off to prevent children from testing their sense of adventure. Kevin and Diane’s children gave them pinwheel jewelry. They love windmills so much that they take them apart and put them back together between their house and the barn.
Some of the interior cladding came from various barns. “When we stood it upright, all we did was brush it with a broom to remove dirt and debris and then seal it,” Kevin said.
Kevin always likes to point tourists to the red door. His carpenter rescued a door from his mother’s old house in Manila. Diana painted it red and added black accents to give it an antique look. The red doors match the sofas Fineran already has, and Diane’s upholstery is painted red. She said that the color is not actually red, but rather reddish.
Diane and Kevin Fineran stand in front of their converted barn with their son Grant and his children Callum (in Diane’s arms) and Elliot (in her father’s arms). Fineran Farm and Barn will host a farmers’ market on Saturday, August 27th. Photograph: Gordon Wolf
Elliot Fineran reads comfortably on the floor of her grandparents’ converted barn. The carpet from the Finerans house goes well with the decor of the living room.
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This aerial photo from the Brock Auction Company shows a piece of land in Plymouth County sold at auction Monday for a record $26,250 an acre.
Post time: Oct-17-2022