Welcome to the Irish Farmers Journal Agricultural Land Price Report for 2025, the 19th such report.

So, it turned out to be a year of stability for the land market. Supply of land for sale was broadly similar to the year before. Average prices across the country rose by just 3% or €361/ac. That is probably a satisfactory outcome for most people involved.

That includes those selling land – farmers (or very often nowadays, their grown-up children), those buying land and for the professional agents that help them.

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Actually, a fairly stable year was generally expected and predicted. With one exception, most of the pointers ahead were good.

On the demand side, dairy farmers were coming out of a period of good milk prices and were still under pressure to acquire more land. Part-time farmers and business people were as keen as ever to buy land and had plenty of money to do so. The outlook for the general economy was positive.

The one wild card in the deck was the new US president Donald Trump and his administration. There were many warnings that his America-first approach to all matters could wreck economies, including ours.

Fast forward to today and what is the outlook for 2026? Once again, the general expectation among auctioneers and agents is for stability. There are some cyclical concerns: milk prices have fallen, the nitrates derogation has been secured for now – so less pressure on some dairy farmers to acquire land – and tillage farmers had a very lean year.

But there are positives we can take: the general economy is thriving and some cattle farmers had – for once in their lives – a profitable year. And there are zero signs of any jump in the supply of land for sale.

But the Trump factor is still there, denting confidence. We don’t know what he and his administration will do next.

We do know that he is capable of doing anything. So, a stable land market in 2026? We’ll take it.

Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland land market was also relatively stable – prices rose by 3% or £466/ac on the year before.

As always, we hope that the Irish Farmers Journal Agricultural Land Price Report will be of use to our readers, both farmers and auctioneers. It aims to capture a major share of the land sales in the Republic and Northern Ireland and to provide a comprehensive analysis of the market.

Details are collected on private treaty as well as public auction sales with the data treated in complete confidence. We aim to show the movements in supply, demand and prices for farmland, from one year to the next.

I would like to thanks auctioneers and their busy staff for taking the time to provide data and help.

This year we continued with our new system under which auctioneers and their staff directly input their own results on to our database.

Sincere thanks to those who took the time to do so.

I would like to thank my colleagues: Ciara Leahy, editor of Irish County Living, for her support, and Peter McCann for his expert analysis of the Northern Ireland land market.

Thanks to Eanna MacGiolla Phadraig, Patrick Feeney, Elaine Hogan and to Diarmuid Nugent for data gathering and calculations.

A big thanks, too, to my colleagues on the production and advertising sides of the Irish Farmers Journal.

And of course, thanks to you our readers for your continued support of this publication.