Is buying land a good investment?

This years’ Positive Farmers Conference is going back to basics, dealing with the issues of grass growth, clover, calf rearing, well-being and the thorny subject of land prices. Conference organiser Mike Murphy has trawled through the records on land prices in Ireland from 1900 to the present.

Speaking to the Irish Farmers JournalMurphy says the average price of land in Ireland in 1900 was €11.43/acre based on the Irish Farmers Journal land price report for 2023 the average price of land last year was €11.925/acre.

He says that between 1900 and 2023 land prices have increased by 5.82% per year before adjusted for inflation and after adjusted for inflation that rate of gain is 1.62% per year.

His analysis also looks at land prices in the UK and the US, and he says that after adjusting for inflation, the rate of gain in the UK has been lower than in Ireland at 1.1% per year while it was higher in the US at 2.2% per year.

“In real purchasing power terms Irish land is now worth roughly 7.2 times more per acre after 123 years. In the USA land is now worth about 11 times its purchasing power parity after 100 years. So the underlying real value of land in the USA and Ireland has appreciated considerably over long periods and overall you’d have to say that land has performed well as an investment.

“However, if the question was asked, ‘is land always a good investment?’, you would get a very different answer because it all depends on what time land was purchased.

Looking at Ireland, land has appreciated very well but there have been three big exceptions to this when land prices have crashed and have taken decades to recover,” he says.

Crashes

The first of these crashes took place in 1920 when land fell from €71.50/acre to €12.32/acre in 1927 which is a fall of 82.7% and it took until 1954, or 34 years for the land to go back to its 1920 price per acre.

He says in 1979 land prices in Ireland went to €3,552/acre only for them to fall to €1,090/acre in 1987, a fall of 69%. Land prices only exceeded 1979 levels in 1998, 18 years after they peaked in 1979.

Murphy says that the most recent peak in land prices was in 2006 when land prices reached €23,616/acre but by 2011 had fallen to €8,001/acre which is a 66% drop.

He says that these prices are not inflation-adjusted, so the true value of the land after it recovers would still be less when inflation is taken into account.

“Clearly, land is not always a good investment so it’s important that people are aware of that.

At the Positive Farmers Conference, I will be highlighting some ways farmers can identify when land is a worthy investment and when buying land should be avoided,” he says.

Day two of the conference is all about workshops, with well-known vet Tommy Heffernan giving a masterclass in calf health before the busy spring period.

Tommy will go through the key ingredients for a successful spring from a calf health point of view.

Tipperary dairy farmer and former banker Pat O’Meara is hosting a workshop on financial budgeting and managing cash flow on dairy farms.

Pat will go through example budgets and the workshop will discuss ways of managing costs.

Mike Murphy will be giving his talk on land prices during a workshop session.

According to the organisers, attendees can choose two out of three workshops on land prices, calf health and budgeting.

Well-known Innishannon Co Cork farmer Fergal Coughlan will outline his farming system and how he intends to get grass growth rates back up to 15t DM/ha.

The former farm manager of the Teagasc research farm at Clonakilty converted the family farm to dairy in 2017, a decision which has been hugely successful.

Fergal says that his time in Teagasc enabled him to upskill and learn the key skills needed to be a successful dairy farmer;

“There was no history of dairying on this farm, having been a suckler and sheep enterprise but with the knowledge of dairying gained in my 20s while traveling and working we could see better opportunities for this farm.

“The key lessons were around understanding the importance of grass targets and how to manage grass, managing people, managing the workflow of a busy farm, identifying areas to improve efficiency and essentially never underestimating the impact of cow health and welfare on herd performance,” he says.

The Coughlans are milking around 150 cows on a 61ha farm of dry and free-draining land outside Innishannon, between Bandon and Kinsale in west Cork. Just 63% of the farm is in the milking platform, with the rest of the land less than one kilometre away.

This means that Fergal is running the milking platform at a high stocking rate of around four cows/ha.

Historic performance has been excellent, with the farm typically growing around 15t DM/ha between the years 2017 to 2022, but growth in recent years has been lower, growing around 13t DM/ha on average between 2022 and 2024.

Limiting factors

While weather conditions have been a big factor in this decline, Fergal will outline how he plans to get growth rates back up to previous years;

“We need to sit down and identify what are the limiting factors within our control for each paddock and why they’re not all growing 14t or 15t DM/ha? Is it soil fertility, grazing management, sward quality or is there just not enough clover in the paddock to drive on grass at reduced chemical nitrogen,” he asks.

The outside land is used primarily for rearing calves and producing silage.

About 500kg DM/cow (2.5 round bales/cow) of high-quality silage is purchased each year from a neighbouring farmer, with Fergal saying that the quality of the silage fed to milking cows in spring and autumn is key; “We can feed the herd on grass and maybe 1.5kg of meal per head during the summer months, but the shoulders are a problem.

It’s no different from farmers on heavy land, they must have good quality silage to feed the milkers as we will inevitably be feeding silage for long periods of the spring and autumn in order to stretch out the grass.”

Almost all of the grass grown during the summer months makes its way down the cow’s throat, with 95% of the annual tonnage on the milking platform used for grazing and just 5% going for silage.

Fergal walked the farm 48 times in 2024 and when the Irish Farmers Journal visited Fergal last week, he had just completed the final grass walk of the year and recorded an average farm cover of 890kg/ha, which is just slightly more than he would like as he wants an opening farm cover of 1,100kg/ha in February.

Fergal will outline at the conference how he manages cow intakes in the spring and autumn, with the herd delivering just shy of 490kg MS/cow in 2024 from 1,100kg of meal per cow, including 126kg/cow of palm kernel.

John Maher from Teagasc will also be speaking at this session on the grass growth lessons from the last two years in terms of clover, nitrogen and targets for 2025. The Positive Farmers Conference is on 15 and 16 January at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Little Island, Cork. Tickets can be purchased online by clicking here

In short