Dinger From the Cab #4: What Is Your Land Really Worth?

Dinger From the Cab #4 | October 2026

Welcome back.

In the Rearview

Both sides of my family farmed in Brown County, South Dakota, up near Hecla and Houghton. My grandparents made it through the 1980s there, in one of the flattest, wettest places I can think of that doesn't grow rice. They held on through years that broke good families. What finally took the land wasn't the markets, interest rates, or the weather. It was death and failing health, the plain fact of a body wearing out, and once that day came there was no way to keep it. The land got sold.

If you have never been to that part of the country, it is hard to describe the water. The James River runs through there with one of the flattest gradients in North America, dropping as little as an inch a mile. Water doesn't run so much as crawl. In a hard rain or a fast thaw the whole system backs up, the river swells out sideways across the ground, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you it can run backward. Just down the way sits Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most awesome places on this earth, where the control structures hold the water high on purpose to keep habitat for the millions of birds that move through. Add decades of wet cycles that pushed the water table up to the surface, and you get low fields that are less field than semi-permanent wetland. Farmers fight that water every single year.

Here is the part that sticks to my bones. Keeping that ground in our family, on my mom's side or my dad's, was never in the cards. The farm couldn't support grown kids moving home, and it couldn't throw off enough to pay the land down and hold it, even to rent it out. So it went. I think about that a lot right now, as Landoption starts talking about what we call our Markets Approach. Because the very things that made that ground so hard to row-crop, the water, the wetland, the birds, the habitat, are things the world will pay for today. Nobody could see that value then, and nobody could sell it. I can't help but wonder how the math would have looked if they could have.

Out the Windshield

Farm income is tight and getting tighter, and I know a lot of families are feeling the same squeeze mine felt. So here is what I want you to hear, in a faith over fear spirit: there is almost always more value sitting in your ground than the bushel price shows. The trouble is that the value hides across thousands of programs nobody has the time to sort through. Our whole job at Landoption is to help you see the entire hand before you decide how to play it.

If you are worried about profitability, start with six questions about your own place. Are you selling your carbon? Could you farm your green acres differently and make more money doing it? Are your red acres, your water, and your habitat paying you, or just costing you? Could your land earn from energy or infrastructure? Could you earn from access, from the hunting and recreation folks already ask you about? And are there premium markets, certifications, or contracts you would be willing to take on for a better price than the elevator? Six questions. Most folks are only playing one or two and leaving the rest sitting in the field. You don't have to chase all six. You just have to look, honestly, before you decide there is nothing left to do.

The Passenger Seat

Faith over fear this week. Ask someone at your table about the hardest stretch your family ever came through, and what actually carried them, the worry or the faith. Then ask what they would tell you to hold onto now.

See you down the road,

Eric