On Tuesday, August 26, 1919, Williams and Jettie Gardner bought a 100-acre farm near Osceola at $166.50 per acre. The following January, they rented their farm to Jim Inyard for $40 an acre for pasture & half the grain. In 2013, the value of an average acre of Iowa farmland was $8,690 per acre. That’s a 5,000% increase in almost a century, nearly 4 times the rate of inflation.