Carving up farmland into home plots is easier said than done. Most fields have zero infrastructure, so you need to drill wells, run power lines, streets and/or ROW for driveways. Internet access is pretty easy as you get get a fiber line run. You'll need to work with the local town and county for permits and be sure that they can handle the additional services such as road maintenance, plowing, trash pickup, etc.

It could be done, but it is not just re-drawing some parcel lines and calling a realtor. Even once you get it done, you now need to build somewhat expensive homes to recover your costs, and the FIRE folks will then probably buy that century farmhouse down the street and re-parcel the connected field to keep a few acres for themselves and sell the rest to the neighbor, as they can almost get a house in the country for free if they do so.

Also you often cant build without owning a minimum of land, like 40 acres. A rule to stop the urbanization of farms. That could change, but for now you'd have to get the zoning board to make an exemption.

so SimCity, but smaller.

Don't forget to add raillines, and watch out for Kaiju

Where I live, it's not the conglomerates buying up farmland but developers. This put a huge strain on infrastructure and also exploded the price of land, so much so the county finally outright banned it.

Not sure the dynamics of Iowa of course, so it could be different...but I do not live in a particular big or interesting area, either.