Knee High by the 4th of July? Corn has changed…

TrophyCast's second episode brought in its first guest, and the crew didn't have to look far — Zach Nixon, District Sales Manager for Beck's Hybrids, covering nine counties in northeast Missouri. He's also cousins with co-host Jason Wallingford, a connection that came up more than once. Zach's a first-generation cattle farmer with a wife and three kids, six years into his career at Beck's, and he came prepared to talk shop — corn, cattle, dirt, deer, and everything in between.

First thing worth knowing: the old saying about corn being knee-high by the Fourth of July doesn't hold up anymore. Modern hybrids are tasseling by early July now. If a field isn't already well above head height by then, something either went wrong or went in late.

Th...

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TrophyCast Is Back — Here's What's Really Happening in the Land Market

TrophyCast just came back from a long break, and it's back with more voices at the table. Mike Meagher, Jason Wallingford, and Jake Brown sat down to catch up on everything that's changed in Midwest real estate over the last few years. No script, no fluff — just three guys who work in this market every day talking through what they're actually seeing.

Residential: It Depends Where You're Standing

Ask three agents how the housing market's doing and you might get three different answers, and that's basically what happened here. The read: there's no clean trend line up or down right now. It's sporadic, and it comes down to location and price point.

Entry-level and move-up housing und...

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Spend enough time walking properties across Missouri — Ozark timber tracts, river bottom ground, CRP-edge farms — and a pattern emerges. About fifty yards into any tree line, the experienced land manager starts doing a silent inventory. Not of the deer sign or the turkey scratching or the mast crop, they're seeing the bad stuff... The stuff that's quietly doing what invasive species do best: winning.

The honest truth that nobody in the conservation world says loudly enough: a landowner can have perfect habitat in mind, spend real money on food plots and mineral stations and stand placement, and still be managing a broken ecosystem — because Bush Honeysuckle has eaten the understory, or Multiflora Rose has turned fence lines into impassable walls, or Japanese Knotweed is growing where the creek used to produce mast. The invasives don't care about anyone's plans. They're on their own schedule....

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The Midwest land market doesn't behave like the stock market. It doesn't react to every headline or correct itself overnight. But it does move — and if you're buying or selling ground in 2026, understanding what's driving that movement matters more than people think.

At Trophy Properties and Auction, we work directly with landowners and buyers across the region. Every property tells its own story, but several trends are shaping values and driving buyer activity this year. Here's what you need to know.

Land Values Are Holding Strong

Despite broader economic headwinds, land values across much of the Midwest have stayed resilient. The reasons aren't complicated:

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A successful food plot doesn't start with the seed. It starts with what's beneath your feet. Most landowners who struggle with underperforming plots are quick to blame seed selection or planting timing. But in the majority of cases, the real issue is soil health — and it's entirely fixable. Here's what you need to know to get it right.

Start With a Soil Test — Every Time

A soil test is the single most important step in food plot preparation, and it's consistently the most skipped. For less than $20 through your local extension office, a basic test tells you:

• Soil pH — how acidic or alkaline your ground is
• Nutrient levels — nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K)

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