A leading farm management software company, Granular, has announced an update to their farmland analysis site, AcreValue. The new version includes significantly more area covered, which now expands from the original states of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana to 46 states. It also has new management and analytical features, including soil maps, production history and mobile optimization.
Farmers, landowners,bankers or other industry professionals may use the site for free to analyze the value or productivity of the land. A subscription based program gives the user an enhanced number of features.
“Among professional farmers who use Granular, the talk is all about how to expand by finding the right land at the right price,” said Tamar Tashjian, General Manager of AcreValue. “We will provide our farmers with the tools to see how adding land will affect the efficiency and profitability of their specific operation and therefore what they should pay to lease or purchase it. At the same time, we are providing the whole agriculture industry with a single convenient and free site to access all publicly available farmland data.”
One of AcreValue’s most important features is its Automated Valuation Model (AVM), the first AVM specifically built for the agriculture industry. AcreValue’s AVM analyzes terabytes of data about soil, climate, crop rotation, taxes, interest rates, comparable land sales and crop prices to automatically estimate the value of each piece of farmland. AVM is common in commercial and residential real estate markets (for example, used in the home value estimates from Zillow).
“Models can never fully predict what a given parcel of land will trade for because they can’t know supply and demand dynamics in advance,” said Chris Seifert, lead Data Scientist on AcreValue. “However, professionals in the market can use the estimates from our AVM as an unbiased starting point for their own analysis and negotiations, and to easily compare the characteristics of different parcels of land.”
“As professional farmland investors, we spend a lot of time collecting and analyzing data from all the publically available sources,” said Eric O’Brien, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Fall Line Capital. “Prior to AcreValue, we would spend countless hours aggregating data from various sources. Now, AcreValue automatically generates that information and brings that data together in one place. AcreValue’s Data Science team is changing the way we make decisions, and the analysis tools they are developing have the potential to help the whole market operate more efficiently.”