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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Generally....how much has "too" varied over time though? Was it as relatively expensive for an middle to upper middle class person to pick up a few acres 30 years ago as it is now? I've heard more than one farmer say you have to operate at very large scales to justify current farm prices, but I have no idea how true that is (and of course, it varies by region).

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> how much has "too" varied over time though?

Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs the Southeast).

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...

We had a centennial farm in my family until about 8 years ago. In the day it was pretty good size, but it didn't expand for many years. Farm land goes up for sale very infrequently, and the economics of buying land even 10 miles from your main operation get very bad very fast with slow equipment and logistics.

Ultimately the farm was too small to be super profitable at about 600 acres (640 in a square mile). It was corn and soybeans, primarily to feed the cattle and hogs. They really couldn't make the economics of splitting between the co-owners, so one bought the other out.

The other operations in the area are 1000+ acres, many 2-3000.

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