Tile the wet 40 myself, or pay the premium for ground that already drains

The easement point in your last paragraph is the whole thread as far as I can tell. If the outlet crosses someone else's land you don't have a construction problem, you have a negotiation with a person who now knows exactly how badly you need something. Whether a drainage easement exists or can be established at all depends on state law and local drainage district rules, so that's a title and attorney question before you price a single foot of pipe. I'd want it answered before I even compared the two asking prices.

plumb is on the right thing. Pull the title work on Farm A early and read the whole chain, not the commitment summary. Old drainage rights sometimes show up as recorded agreements from decades back and sometimes they exist only as a handshake that died with the previous owner. Recording practice for these varies by state, and I've read commitments that mentioned nothing while the county drainage district had a file an inch thick.

harrow, on the money: the spread between the two farms is about $1,400 an acre on 155 versus 140, so you're paying roughly $200,000 more in total for B on fewer acres. Your tile estimate on A tops out around $56,000 plus outlet. That gap is wide enough that A wins on arithmetic by a lot, which is usually the sign that the arithmetic is missing something. Here what it's missing is the two or three years between closing and the tile actually working, the possibility the wet section is wet for a reason tile won't fix, and your own time.

Get the operator to tell you the yield difference in bushels on that 40. If it's fifteen bushels, tile pays back fast. If it's forty, ask why.

I'm starting from zero here so this may be naive, but how do you even confirm the mid nineties tile on Farm B still functions? A map from 1996 tells you where pipe was put, not whether it's crushed or full of roots now.

ember, that's not naive at all, it's the right question. From the trades side: you check the outlets. Walk every outlet after a rain and see what's actually running. A dead outlet on a supposedly tiled field is obvious in about ten seconds and it's the cheapest inspection you'll ever do.

Beyond that, yield maps do the work. If the 1996 system has failed somewhere, the wet spots show up in the harvest data even if nobody has connected the dots. harrow said Farm B has consistent yield history across the whole field, which is decent evidence the tile is doing its job. That's the thing you're actually paying the premium for, and it's more reliable than the map.

I do fast deals on thin margins and I'd take Farm A, with a condition. The tile only makes sense if you've got the cash sitting there to do it in the first two years. Buy A stretched, plan to tile in year four, and you've just bought worse dirt at a discount and told yourself a story about it. That's the mistake I've made in three different renovations and it costs the same every time.

harrow, the other thing I'd check is whether your operator will pay more rent after the tile goes in, in writing, before you spend the money. Landowners fund the improvement and then discover the rent conversation goes differently than expected. Get the number agreed while he's the one asking you for something.