What if you bought Iowa farmland (acre) in 1990?
Real estate · Land. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play9.6× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Iowa farmland (acre) at the start of 1990 would be worth about $9,583 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
An acre of Iowa farmland is about as tangible as an investment gets: soil, corn, soybeans and a property tax bill. The 1990 starting point came shortly after the 1980s farm crisis, when high interest rates and falling crop prices had pushed values down sharply and many farms into foreclosure. Through the 1990s prices recovered slowly and unglamorously, the kind of return that never makes a dinner party anecdote.
The mid-2000s changed that. Federal ethanol mandates turned corn into fuel, Chinese demand for soybeans soared and interest rates fell, so land values roughly doubled within a few years and hit records around 2013. A slide followed as crop prices eased, then the early 2020s brought another surge on strong commodity prices and cheap money. One thing this price table leaves out is the rent: landowners typically also collected a few percent a year from tenant farmers, which over decades accounts for a large part of the total return.
The lesson: Price charts can understate income assets badly, so for farmland, rental property or dividend stocks always ask what the cash flow added on top.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $1,200 | $9,583 | $19,429 | 9.6× |
| 1995 | $1,500 | $7,667 | $14,783 | 7.7× |
| 2000 | $1,900 | $6,053 | $4,626 | 6.1× |
| 2003 | $2,200 | $5,227 | $7,727 | 5.2× |
| 2005 | $2,900 | $3,966 | $5,763 | 4.0× |
| 2007 | $3,900 | $2,949 | $4,789 | 2.9× |
| 2008 | $4,500 | $2,556 | $4,626 | 2.6× |
| 2010 | $5,000 | $2,300 | $6,071 | 2.3× |
| 2012 | $8,300 | $1,386 | $5,312 | 1.4× |
| 2015 | $8,000 | $1,438 | $3,301 | 1.4× |
| 2018 | $7,200 | $1,597 | $2,519 | 1.6× |
| 2020 | $7,300 | $1,575 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $9,583. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Iowa farmland (acre) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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