Jon Harting's Blog

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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If you've spent a spring morning working a gobbler into range, you already know the first reward is the hunt. But if you ask Jason Cleveland, broker partner at Trophy Property and Auctions, the second reward might be even better.

"This is by far my family's favorite wild game recipe," Jason says. "Everybody I've ever made it for says the same thing." High praise—and after one bite of his wild turkey parmesan, it's easy to understand why.

Here's how he makes it.

Start with Good Cuts

The foundation of this dish is properly prepped turkey breast. Jason breaks down the breast ahead of time, trimming away any fascia or fat until he's left with clean, uniform cuts of meat. (He covers the full breakdown process in a separate video if you need a starting point.)

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Wild turkey gets a bad reputation it doesn't deserve. Ask most people who've eaten it and they'll tell you the same thing — it was tough, stringy, chewy. And they're not wrong about their experience. But the problem almost never starts in the kitchen. It starts at the processing table, and it has a name: silver skin.

A turkey breast is made up of several distinct muscle groups separated by fascia and connective tissue. Leave that stuff in, and it doesn't matter how good your recipe is — someone at the table is going to hit a chewy bite and decide wild turkey isn't for them. Take the time to break it down properly first, and what you're left with is clean, tender meat that holds up to any preparation you want to throw at it.

Here's how to do it.

What You're Working With

Before you start cuttin...

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