With the outlook for both wheat and beef prices looking strong over the next five years, farming and ranching are gaining appeal both as destinations for investors and as a career for young talent.
“We’re seeing younger people that have come back into agriculture, and most of them are doing fine,” says Brett Legg, president of Eastern Colorado Bank in Cheyenne Wells, 2-1/2 hours east of Denver, where 36,500 acres of farm and ranch land are headed for auction on April 20.
Thatap a huge amount of land, and a very unusual offering, says Scott Shuman, a partner in Hall and Hall, brokers/auctioneers who have been selling western real estate since the 1940s.
This offering, with Hall and Hall wielding the gavel, is an assemblage of non-contiguous parcels that Cheyenne County farmer/rancher Harold Rother assembled over decades from an original 320-acre purchase that he and his brother made in the early 1950s.
Hall and Hall’s high-tech farm auctions are an ideal way to bring a complex offering like that to market. The Rother holdings are divvied into 28 parcels, offering specialized varieties for individual investors or operators. There are tracts designed around either farming or ranching—including some 1,800 acres of irrigated land.
One parcel is as small as 150 acres, just short of a quarter square mile—the kind of offering, Shuman says, that may appeal to a smaller investor wary of the stock market, wanting to diversify. The rental market for farmland, he adds, is strong—lots of interest from local operators wanting to lease some acreage from owners.
Hall and Hall’s Shuman says Rother (he passed away in 2007) was a great farmer, one who put attention into improving the value of his land. “You often hear that story from families, ‘We paid $100 an acre for this and we didn’t know how we would ever pay it off.’ Then you see how well they did.”
Shuman says that Hall and Hall’s auctioning system adds even more potential value for sellers as well as buyers, “An auction puts everyone on the same playing field,” he notes.
“I suspect it will go quite well,” says ECB’s Legg. “Recent land sales have been strong.”
Shuman adds another favorable sign he’s seeing as the sale approaches—interest from lenders, wanting to be involved in purchases.
The Rother auction is Tuesday, April 20, 10 a.m. at the Burlington Community Center in Burlington, Colo. Hall and Hall has a preview of the properties this Tuesday in Cheyenne Wells, noon to 2 p.m., or visit the web site.
The news and editorial staffs of The Denver Post had no role in this postap preparation.