AcreValue start-up evaluates the landscape of farm data

Like access to farmland, data moves quickly. And in agriculture, there has long been a gap in making accurate farmland data accessible.

"The challenge with farmland data is that given all the counties you may work within, all the ways you can track information in spreadsheets, and the manner of geospatial services, it's still really hard to get a quick report on a parcel or portfolio or a market you are unfamiliar with," says Landon Frye, director at AcreValue.

AcreValue, an online farmland information and evaluation platform, seeks to collect disparate land data and make it easily searchable for investors, farmers, brokers, and bankers.

The company, formerly owned by Granular, a subsidiary of Corteva Agriscience, was acquired by Ag-Analytics this fall.

• READ MORE: Ag-Analytics acquires AcreValue

About 1 million users access AcreValue's farmland data, which includes:

• Parcel-owner
• Common land units
• Soil survey
• Soil productivity
• Land use (crop history for five years)
• Sales comp data
• Valuation estimates
• Listings of land for sale

How it Works

"AcreValue basically acts as a Google search," Frye explains. Enter a landowner name, geography, crop type, etc., and receive a listing of land parcels that match.

The data is aggregated from the public, free data sets from the USDA, which include information on land cover, crops, soil productivity. AcreValue also purchased county-level data from third-party sources to fill out the rest.

There are upwards of 36 million tracts of land with 50-60 key data points and layers on each.

Farmland profiles include data like:

• Valuation estimate
• Acres
• Listing of other parcels by the same owner
• Owner address
• Carbon potential
• Land use
• Parcel/tax ID

Data Reports

AcreValue's land valuation capabilities make it easy to distill down a search to make comparisons across properties and market sales.

"In the same way that Tesla cameras have gotten better at figuring out what is and isn't a stop sign based on viewing millions of stop signs, that's how our land valuation model has developed and improved," Frye says.

The model references thousands of comps and their variables to draw correlations between tracts of land and create a valuation. You can find land valuations for California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

And launched just this week, landowners can list land for sale.

In addition, you can search for absentee landowners in specific counties, top landowners in any geographic region, and owners of farms with characteristics that you specify.

"It would take just a minute or two to have all this land data laid out nicely in front of you," says Frye. Reports can be saved and referred back to at any time.

While there isn't an app, AcreValue is mobile-optimized.

If you're out on the road and have questions about who owns the land around you, by logging into AcreValue and enabling location, the platform will find you and return farmland data near you – much like GPS.

Frye says that although AcreValue has been around for seven years, it continues to refine the existing data sets and ensure transparency.