To sell or not to sell - record farm commodity prices a good reason to stay put

A South Australian farm family has chosen to do exactly that recently, selling one parcel of land but hanging to another to take advantage of the good season and high grain prices.

Real estate agents are saying some farmers were postponing retirement to take advantage of the bumper years.

This is expected to lead to a rush of farmland sales when weather conditions and commodity prices change.

A case in point is a large land offering in the Upper South East region of South Australia which was being sold much later in the selling season by Ray White Rural.

Agents had launched an expressions of interest campaign for the Roberts' family's Camden and Greenhills farms across a combined 1801 hectares (4451 acres) of mixed cropping/grazing country.

The farm aggregation is 23km south east of Tailem Bend.

The property was offered in two lots - Lot 1 was Camden (1143ha, 2824ac) and Lot 2 was Greenhills (658ha, 1627ac).

It was the second lot, Greenhills, which was sold.

Agent Daniel Schell said the vendors were "happy" with the price offers for the second block.

But when it came to weighing up the offers for the bigger Camden, after doing the sums, they decided it was better to hang on it and sell it later in the year.

Mr Schell said the area had a good weather break with good rainfalls recorded during the sowing of winter crops.

The plan was for the farm owner to sow this year's crop and hand it over with the crops included as the cherry on top.

After the execution of the sales contract and payment of a deposit the new owner would have been granted tillage rights to complete sowing and benefit from the 2022 harvest.

The successful offer for Greenhills by a local Cooke Plains farm family is now proceeding to settlement at the end of this month when they can check out the crops.

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Because of the settlement conditions, no price has been provided for the sale of Greenhills.

It is now planned for that withdrawn first lot, Camden, to be offered again in spring, likely at auction.

Another financial inducement to postpone the sale was Camden also has about 100ha sown to dryland lucerne - handy at a time of record stock prices.

Other features included a four-bedroom homestead with a renovated kitchen and bathrooms plus an in-ground swimming pool.

It has a large hay shed.

Greenhills was sold with 117ha sown to dryland lucerne.

It has an almost century old stone homestead in an elevated setting with three bedrooms.

There is also a three-stand shearing shed, steel sheep yards with three-way drafting race and loading ramp. It also has steel cattle yards, loading ramp an implement shed, two stone barns and a workshop.

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