If you are a surviving spouse of a farmer, you may also be treated as materially participating in the farm, if the real property used for farming meets the estate tax rules for special valuation of farm property passed from a qualifying decedent and the surviving spouse actively manages the farm.

Search your farm county and see what adjudicated papers there are, and what they have available online.  

In other words, when I had State Farm, they would set the max replacement cost for what it would cost to rebuild.

But if they're going to actually make the loan, and are pooling funds, they will have had to do a bunch of work, including actually collecting the money, long before this point.Jon, many act as a broker, they don't hold the funds because they would need to paay interest to those investors, so they may farm out applications/deals, get investors to sign on, then give a loan commitment.

I would like to buy the land, and split it so I can keep an acre because it boarders my family farm.

A friend of mine is considering working with them, and he's having trouble finding anyone who has partnered with them in the past or has any knowledge of their history and reputation.Any input is welcome and appreciated!

I don't want to give away the farm, but I would be more comfortable doing a traditional "non-reverse" exchange.

We didn't get a single deal between July 2013 and the end of the year -- part of the reason was that we moved to a new state, but things were also pretty sparse in my farm areas and deals are hard to come by.But, since the beginning of the year, we put two properties under contract (one likely to be a rental that we're closing tomorrow and one a flip that we're closing next week) and we're currently discussing a partnership with another investor for a big waterfront rehab and up to 5 spec house builds.

Our realtor would take us to see one or two homes in different subdivisions when we first started working with him that looked like great values, but he would call them "goat farms" and show us, for instance, where the slab was seriously cracked up or half the siding had blown off in the last minor storm.

When I was more seriously about finding deals on the MLS, I would create a search in my farm area that contained any keywords that might indicate a distressed sale (short sales, REOs, investor sales, etc).