Fitting The Pieces Together For Your Farm

Considerations

When looking for a farm to buy you need to consider a couple things.  First thing is to remember it's YOUR farm.  Not the farmer's or the farm manager's it's YOUR farm.  You'll want a farm that fits your personality.  And no I'm not talking about whether or not you have sense of humor.  I'm talking about it needs to match your current situation and your goals.  Other things to consider as follows.

Location

Do you want to be able to drive to your farm easily?  To some this may matter.  They may want to have the ability to keep their eye on what's going on with their investment.  Or you may want to be close to town with the idea of selling it for development ground.  Others may not care about the location at all.

Soils

This may be an obvious thing but I figured I would hit it anyways.  For a farm to be a good farm it needs to have good deep soils.  We at Rural KC will help you identify what's good soils and not.  We will look at the depth and soil type and that helps us define what is good and what isn't.  But most importantly, we lean on the opinion of a local farmer over this.  A local farmer knows which farms are good and which aren't.  While these soil maps are great.  Nothing beats local knowledge.

Farmability

This is something the local farmer should be the go to guy.  However, by looking at an aerial you usually can get a good idea if it's farmable or not.  First you would look at the soils and make sure they are deep.  Next you need to ask yourself a few questions.  Is it hilly?  Is it rocky?  Is there too much timber?  Is it in pasture or already broken up?  If it's in pasture is there farmland around it?  These are good starting points but once again, the local farmer would be the best one to answer this question.