The market for Iowa farmland is showing clear signs of cooling after a decade of sharp price increases. But Mike Duffy, an Iowa State University (ISU) Extension economist who has monitored farmland prices for decades, doesn’t foresee a bursting bubble followed by a free fall in land prices similar to ones that occurred in the farm crisis years of the 1980s or an earlier bust in the 1920s.

"I don’t think a collapse is a high probability," Duffy wrote re­­cently in an article on ISU’s Ag Decision Maker website.

While recent farmland price increases have ...