With so much focus on farmland as an investment, it’s easy to get the idea that investors are the ones doing all the buying, but the opposite is true. In fact, investors were buying a higher percentage of the farmland in Illinois 2004 than farmers. (Illinois is the only state on which we have statistics, but our auction results reflect the same trend elsewhere.) If we spring forward to 2009, the last year the data was available, we see farmers were purchasing twice as much Illinois farmland as investors.