Farmers paying less rent for Eastern Iowa Airport land

CEDAR RAPIDS - Farmers will pay less cash rent per acre to The Eastern Iowa Airport for the next growing season.

The Cedar Rapids Airport Commission on Monday approved leases for five farm operators at $337 per acre, down from $380 per acre in 2015 and $400 per acre in 2012.

Don Swanson, airport director of finance and administration, said the lower cash rent figure will reduce the total for the 1,924 acres of farmland owned by the airport to $648,362, down $103,000 from last year.

The total number of acres rented by farmers was reduced by 75 acres. John Yeomans of Farmers National, which manages the airport's farmland, said soil testing performed last spring provided a more accurate number of tillable acres.

'Our operators only want to rent what they are farming,” Yeomans said. 'We tightened up the number of acres that are actually being farmed.”

Farmland cash rent goes into the airport's general operating fund. The farmland surrounds the airport, which has acquired the land for potential expansion as the land was offered for purchase.

Iowa State University's 2015 farmland cash rent survey, released in May and revised in August, found high quality farmland in Linn County fetching cash rent of $331 per acre for corn and soybeans. The statewide average for all crop reporting districts was $292 per acre.

Farmland cash rent paid to Iowa landlords in 2015 averaged $250 per acre, down $10 from $260 per acre in 2014, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Non-irrigated cropland rent averaged $250 per acre in 2015, down $10 from a year earlier. The cash rent for irrigated cropland was not published by the USDA to avoid disclosure of individual operations.

Cash rates to lease farmland decreased 8 percent in 2015 relative to 2014 in the Federal Reserve Bank Seventh District, which includes Iowa. That was the largest annual average decrease since 1987.

Earlier this month, the USDA projected farm net incomes in 2016 will drop to $54.8 billion, down almost 3 percent from 2014, as sharply lower prices for corn, soybeans and wheat continued to reduce cash flow and negatively impact farmland values.