Every week someone calls me with the same question, phrased a dozen different ways: "What's my ground worth?" or "What should I offer on that 80 acres out on County Road 300?" There's no single number that answers that — and anyone who gives you one without asking about soil, drainage, and access is guessing. I've been an Indiana Certified Appraiser since 2006, and farm ground is the category where that credential actually matters most, because farmland doesn't price itself the way a three-bedroom ranch does.
This isn't a sales pitch dressed up as an article. It's the same data I'd walk a client through before they make an offer — where Montgomery County land actually stands right now, according to the sources that set the market, and why the number on any one parcel can swing by thousands of dollars an acre from the number on the parcel next door.
The Honest Answer: There's No Single "Montgomery County Price"
I want to be direct about something before we get into numbers: nobody publishes a reliable, parcel-level "Montgomery County average" for farmland sale prices, and I'm not going to invent one. County-level farm sale data is thin — Montgomery County only sees a handful of bare-ground transactions in a given year, which isn't enough sales for a statistically sound average. Anyone quoting you a precise county-wide per-acre figure is either rounding from a regional survey or making it up.
What does exist, and what I rely on professionally, is regional survey data from Purdue University's Department of Agricultural Economics — the most credible, methodologically transparent farmland pricing research done anywhere in this state. Montgomery County sits inside their "West Central" reporting region, alongside Benton, Carroll, Fountain, Parke, Putnam, Tippecanoe, Vermillion, Warren, and White Counties.¹
Where West Central Indiana Farmland Stood in Mid-2025
Purdue surveys farm managers, appraisers, brokers, lenders, and Farm Service Agency staff twice a year and publishes the results in the Purdue Agricultural Economics Report. The most recent full survey (June 2025 data, published August 2025) put West Central Indiana farmland at:¹
- Top-quality land: $14,388/acre (down 4.5% from June 2024)
- Average-quality land: $11,731/acre (down 9.3% from June 2024)
- Poor-quality land: $10,135/acre (down 1.3% from June 2024)
For comparison, the statewide averages moved in the opposite direction over the same period — top land up 3.0%, average land up 5.4%, poor land up 7.6%.¹ That divergence matters: it tells you West Central Indiana, including Montgomery County, softened relative to the rest of the state in 2025 even as the state overall hit record territory. If someone tells you "Indiana farmland is up across the board," they're technically right about the state and wrong about us.
Cash rent moved the other direction locally — up between roughly 3.6% and 5.6% depending on land quality — which is its own signal. Rent held or climbed while sale prices in this region cooled, which usually means income expectations stayed steady while buyers got more cautious about what they'd pay upfront.¹
A caveat worth stating plainly: these are regional averages across ten counties, not a Montgomery County number. Individual parcels here can land above or below these figures by a wide margin — I'll explain why below.
Why This Isn't the Same as Your Property Tax Assessment
I get asked to reconcile two very different numbers all the time: the market value farmland sells for, and the assessed value the county taxes it on. They're not supposed to match, and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes I see buyers and sellers make.
For the 2026 assessment year, the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance set the statewide agricultural land base rate at $2,120 per acre.² That figure isn't a market estimate — it's calculated using an income-capitalization formula (net income ÷ capitalization rate, with a 9.0% cap rate applied to a six-year rolling average of cash rent and farm operating income, using the lowest five of those six years per state law). It's built for uniform, defensible property tax assessment, not for telling you what a buyer would actually pay at a farm sale. County assessors then adjust that base rate parcel-by-parcel using soil productivity factors — which is a topic worth its own article, because it's genuinely one of the more misunderstood parts of Indiana farmland ownership.
If you're only looking at your tax bill's assessed value, you're looking at a formula built for the tax code — not a market appraisal.
What Actually Moves an Individual Parcel's Value
This is where the appraiser side of my job earns its keep. The regional survey numbers above are averages across thousands of acres. On any single Montgomery County parcel, I'm weighing:
- Soil productivity and drainage. Two farms a half-mile apart can carry meaningfully different values based on soil type and whether the field is tiled. I go into this in more depth in my Buying Farm Land in West Central Indiana guide, including how WAPI (Weighted Average Productivity Index) scores factor into pricing.
- Tillable-to-non-tillable ratio. A "100-acre farm" with 70 tillable acres and 30 acres of woods or waterway prices very differently, acre for acre, than a fully tillable quarter-section.
- Access and road frontage. Legal, all-season access affects both usability and resale value — sometimes more than buyers expect going in.
- CRP enrollment. Land under a Conservation Reserve Program contract carries a different income profile than actively farmed ground, which changes how it should be valued.
- Recent comparable sales, weighted for how similar the comps actually are — not just the nearest ones on a map.
That's the sales-comparison and income-approach methodology at work, side by side with the market data above, rather than instead of it.
Where This Leaves You
If you're trying to price a Montgomery County farm to sell, evaluate an offer, or figure out what you can afford, the regional numbers above are your starting point, not your answer. A credible number for your specific ground requires walking the property — checking soil maps, drainage, access, and recent comparable sales that actually resemble what you have.
If you're weighing a residential move in the same area, my Montgomery County page and the July 2026 Montgomery County housing market update cover where the town and residential markets stand right now — farmland and residential real estate here move on different timelines and different logic.
I'm not going to tell you a number for your specific acreage in a blog post, because that wouldn't be honest work. But I will walk it with you. Call or text me at (765) 230-6335, or reach out through my contact page, and we'll go look at what you actually have.
A note on scope: This article simplifies parts of Indiana's agricultural assessment methodology (soil productivity factors, influence factors, and the full base-rate adjustment process) for readability. It is not appraisal, legal, or tax advice, and it reflects data published through late 2025/early 2026. Farmland values and assessment rates change with each survey and assessment cycle — confirm current figures before relying on them for a transaction.
