NEVADA, Iowa — It’s a rainy day before the spring planting season has begun. The fields are brown, but the promise of green is there.

And apparently a lot of farmers and investors are seeing the promise of another kind of green in the fields of Iowa because land values have shot up in the past six months.

So far this year, some central Illinois farmland is selling for record prices, said Diane Zelhart, certified general appraiser for Compeer Financial.

There’s been an auction in all seven central Illinois counties with prices up between 5 to 10%, she said.

Supported by higher crop prices and government payments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, farmland values in Missouri have been going up.

John Dyer, a farmer and real estate agent for United Country Real Estate, says the value of good farmland has gone up 5%, or in some cases even 10% in the last year.

Byron Menke has been selling houses for a long time, but he cannot recall a time when “sold” signs replaced “for sale” signs before the dirt around the post hole had time to settle.

“I’ve been doing this for 21 years, and our inventory is at the lowest level I’ve ever seen,” says Menke, president-elect of the Iowa Association of Realtors. “It’s that way around the state. We have less than a month’s supply of homes in most places.”