It was an eventful day on March 10 at The Home Place, also known as the Seniors Citizen Building, in Calhoun, Kentucky. Kurtz Auction & Realty Company was authorized to sell the Doris N. Woosley Estate to the highest bidder. No minimum bid required – not that it was a problem.
The final sale of the 449.26 acres of Green River Bottoms Farmland, located a couple of miles outside Calhoun, topped out at $4,285,717.50 , reported a Kurtz Realty spokesperson. That makes the per acre cost somewhere around $9,500. The buyers were said to be 2 area farmers.
“Two tracts of tiled silty loam soil totaling 266.3 acres sold for $10,300 per acre, one of the highest prices for farmland sold at public auction in this area of Western Kentucky.
I sold some a couple of years ago about a mile from this land that brought more money than that,” but “it included mineral rights and this land didn’t,” Kurtz auctioneer Joe Mills said in an news item from the The McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
According to the article, “The remaining four tracts, totaling 185.62 acres of flat, untiled silty loam cropland, sold for an average of $8,285 per acre. Two of these tracts had Green River frontage, although neither the coal and other minerals rights nor the riparian rights along the river were included.”
Other interesting details about the auction from the Kurtz website.
- The cropland has been cash rented for the 2015 crop year at $215.05 per acre with the buyer receiving their share at closing. Payments will be based on cropland acreage. Buyer is also responsible for a prorated share of weed kill product for ditches if needed.
- Farms have been limed within the last 5 years.
- Sellers agree to cooperate with a buyer on a 1031 tax-free exchange.
- Minerals and Riparian Rights: There are no mineral, fleeting or riparian rights involved in this sale. Fleeting and riparian rights involve the area 150′ from the low water mark on Tracts 5 & 6.
- This land is mostly flat Green River bottom land subject to seasonal flooding.
