Buying a plot of land in rural America has never been so expensive. And that’s even with soaring interest rates.

Rising commodity prices mean farmers made record amounts of money this year, spurring a rush for space to plant in 2023. More demand comes just as people fled to the countryside during the pandemic — with non-metropolitan areas growing faster than urban ones — and investors turned to fields as a hedge against inflation.

Farmland prices in the Midwest, the nation’s breadbasket, jumped 20% just in the third quarter from a year earlier — bucking a downturn in the residential real estate market, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the National Association of Realtors. That was the eleventh consecutive quarter of gains, the longest streak since 2014.

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