A 63-acre tract in Allen County, Indiana, sold for about $1.348 million—$21,394 per acre—after two adjoining neighbors competed for it at an August 2024 auction. The sale was the highest per-acre result among the auctioned tracts, but it is a transaction-specific price, not a statewide benchmark for farmland.
What sold, and where?
Painter Family Farms, LLC, sold 435 acres in Hoagland and Monroeville, in Allen County, about 10 miles southeast of Fort Wayne. The land was organized into eight groups containing 14 tracts. Thirteen tracts went to auction on August 22, 2024. The remaining 38.5-acre tract, beside an AEP substation, had already been sold privately to American Electric Power (AEP) for an undisclosed amount.
More than 250 people attended. Schrader agent Mike Roy called it “one of the largest public land auctions in probably 10 years,” a characterization of the event that was not independently compared with other auctions over that period.
How much did each auctioned group bring?
The reported results ranged from $14,509 to $21,394 per acre. Several figures cover groups of tracts, so they should not be read as the price of every individual tract within a group.
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| Tract or group | Reported price per acre | Sale detail |
|---|---|---|
| Tract 1 | $18,000 | 20 acres; bought by a developer for $360,000 |
| Tracts 2 and 3 | $17,323 | Reported as a combined group price per acre |
| Tracts 4 through 7 | $14,999 | Reported as a combined group price per acre |
| Tracts 8 and 9 | $18,110 | Reported as a combined group price per acre |
| Tract 10 | $21,394 | 63 acres; about $1,348,000 total |
| Tract 11 | $15,535 | Per-acre result as reported |
| Tracts 12 and 13 | $14,509 | Reported as a combined group price per acre |
| Tract 14 | Not stated (Successful Farming, September 19, 2024) | 38.5 acres sold privately to AEP before the auction |
Successful Farming reported that four farmers, a developer, and AEP bought land. Roy said “two neighbors who have adjoining land to the property got into a bidding war” over Tract 10. That reported competition is the explanation given for its top result; the account does not quantify how much of the price was attributable to bidding rather than the land’s features.
Why a single tract can outprice the rest
The sale account notes differences among parcels in acreage, road frontage, access, levelness or elevation, soils, drainage features, and nearby uses. These are useful factors to consider when comparing farmland, but the reported results do not isolate the effect of any one feature. Nor do grouped results show a uniform value for every tract in the group.
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Competition from nearby owners also matters to the interpretation. A neighbor may value a parcel for how it connects to or expands existing land, while a buyer without adjoining acreage may assess it differently. The account ties Tract 10’s unusually high result to two adjoining neighbors bidding against each other; it does not establish that comparable land elsewhere would command the same premium.
How the auction compares with Indiana averages
Purdue University’s 2024 Farmland Value and Cash Rent Survey put statewide bare-cropland averages in June 2024 at $14,392 per acre for top-quality land, $11,630 for average-quality land, and $9,071 for poor-quality land. Those survey averages are context, not appraisals of the Painter Family Farms parcels. A specific auction result and a statewide survey average measure different things.
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Purdue reported that top-quality farmland averaged $14,909 per acre in June 2026, up 0.6% from June 2025. That later statewide figure offers newer context, but it is not a direct comparison with the August 2024 Allen County auction and should not be used to restate that transaction as a current market price.
For the 2024 survey, Purdue’s Todd H. Kuethe, Schrader Endowed Chair in Farmland Economics and survey author, said: “A number of forces, such as high interest rates and lower farm incomes, are placing downward pressure on prices, but the limited supply of land is keeping prices firm.”
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What buyers planned to do with the land
Roy believed most of the property would remain in farming, except the tracts bought by the developer and AEP. The available account does not detail the developer’s plans or disclose what AEP paid for its privately purchased tract.
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Sources and dated context
- Successful Farming’s September 19, 2024 account of the Allen County auction.
- Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture’s 2024 Farmland Value and Cash Rent Survey.
- Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture’s 2026 Farmland Value and Cash Rent Survey.
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