The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI) and Teagasc collaborate to publish this annual Agricultural Land Market Review & Outlook, offering valuable insights into agricultural land selling prices and rental rates. This report not only highlights key trends within the land market, but also provides a comprehensive overview of the agricultural sector’s recent economic performance and short-term outlook.
The compilation of average land values and rental values offers impartial insights into the Irish market, benefiting prospective buyers, sellers, and policymakers vested in agricultural and land market dynamics. This report evaluates land values across various counties and provinces in Ireland, and considers diverse land types and plot sizes. It is crucial to highlight that land quality and pricing can vary significantly from one parcel to another as certain plots may be more conducive to specific agricultural activities than others.
Our eleventh annual report provides a review of 2023 and an outlook for 2024, with a selection of useful insights regarding the expected performance of the agricultural sector. Farmers have been impacted by high cost inflation following the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Although energy prices, feed costs and fuel inflation eased in the second half of 2023, agriculture continues to face challenges in relation to profitability, climate change, policy, and inclement weather conditions. These factors are currently hampering farming activities and farm margins.
With these challenges also come opportunities. Since 2021, The Climate Action Plan has included a target to increase the share of electricity generated from renewable sources to 80% by 2030. Ireland therefore intends to increase its solar PV energy generation, with revised objectives escalating from 2.5GW to 8GW by 2030, and the achievement of this target will have an influence on agricultural land markets. Solar technology continues to improve and with this is an increased number of solar farm planning applications to supply the grid with renewable energy. This report contains a special feature on the use of agricultural land for renewable energy generation that delves into sources such as solar energy, production of biomethane and wind energy. We hope that it will help to address the queries that land agents, landowners and those seeking to purchase or lease land for the purpose of solar may have.
The review’s findings in respect of land market activity are based on an SCSI survey, which was conducted on a nationwide basis in February and March 2024. This survey was completed by Chartered Surveyors operating in the auctioning, private treaty sale, tendering and land rental transactions, including those who provide specialist valuation services to clients.
We believe that you will find this edition of the report to be insightful, and we wish to express our gratitude to SCSI staff, Teagasc staff, and SCSI members for their significant contributions to this report