It’s a sign of the times perhaps, but farmland has become one of the many assets that has been soaring to new heights lately. According to figures from Savills, the estate agency, the average acre of UK farmland now changes hands for a record £3,000, 36 per cent more than 10 years ago.

Even that is not near the tip of the iceberg. Crispin Holborow, head of Savills’ farm sales, says: “If you look at good quality arable farm land in most parts of the country, you might be getting a touch below £4,000 an acre, but you would hope to do better and very often you can do better.”

Oddly enough, despite floods and tales of financial woe, the biggest single source of demand has been farmers themselves. Savills says half of the buyers are tillers of the land, with nearly three-quarters of them citing plans to expand as the reason for their purchases. Farmers’ current optimism is backed by incomes boosted by soaring commodity prices – wheat, for instance, has jumped from £60 to more than £100 a tonne in a year.

British farmers are being joined in this land grab by their counterparts from Scandinavia and Ireland, where rolling acres cost even more, according to Mr Holborow. But he is more interested in the return of the City buyer.

Institutional investors, like pension funds, were sellers in the late 1980s. Now individual high-rollers are coming back to the land, fuelled by fat bonuses and business profits. “This is not a big enough market for funds,” he says, “but individuals can get involved. If it’s got something extra – some barns or some cottages on the edge of a village – they can gain rewards if farmland takes a dip in the future.”

This sort of demand and a serious shortage of supply make Mr Holborow bullish about the outlook for the price of land. “It hasn’t been rising for long and I think it’s got some legs in it yet,” he says. “You would need to see a dramatic upturn in supply to see a change in the dynamics.”

It is worth remembering that, even now, prices are little more than they were in the late 1980s. That should be further good news for bulls, both real and metaphorical, but remember that costs have also leapt for farmers in the past 20 years.

Anyone jumping into farmland now should cast aside rose-tinted views of comfortable country-gentlemanship. Unless you are rich enough to be a hobby farmer, it is turning those “extra” barns and cottages into holiday homes or buy-to-let investments that is going to make farmland pay at these sorts of prices.

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