We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to future land development.

The current support policy is increasing gaps in land management intensity among different regions of the country. The support policy for agricultural and rural development does not deal with solutions for land abandonment or environmental objectives, because the abandonment is becoming a hidden, environmental policy and rural development process, which is more expensive for society. Some alternative approaches and principles for designing a new agricultural land policy for Latvia could decrease the policy costs and make land management more targeted and acceptable for society.

The basic agricultural structure in Poland consists of small and medium family-owned farmsteads. Public funds grant their support primarily to farmers capable of competing efficiently within the EU market. In most cases, that means farmsteads covering a larger area. It is the real property market that regulates the agrarian structure. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to present the situation on the farmland market in respect to Poland's membership in the European Union.

In the research was submitted agricultural land market in Poland, in the political system transformation conditions, with consideration it function, stimulating the structural change of farming including territorial structure. There were characterized changes occurring in polish country with indication of the following processes: growing strength of agricultural land market, increasing role of agricultural lands' lease and also progressive process of land concentration and changing ownership relations.

The Porter Hypothesis relates the effects of environmental regulation on (a) technological innovation and (b) economic performance. Specifically, it asserts that innovation offsets can occur. These are a type of technological change that will "partially or more than fully offset the costs of complying with environmental regulation" (Porter and van der Linde, 1995, p. 98). The hypothesis has been highly debated, in part, because nomenclature has been careless. Also, the role of property rights in defining innovation offsets has been neglected.

The purpose of the study was to find out the factors affecting farmland prices in Finland. A hedonic pricing model that takes into account the presence of spatial dependence was applied for a very large sales price data (6 281 observations). The results confirmed the importance of land quality and the structural change as determinants of land price. In addition, off-farm job possibilities seemed to have a significant role in determining land prices.

Over recent years considerable research has been devoted to the assessment of the rural landscape value. These studies have concerned both use and non-use value estimation. An important issue in monetary evaluations is about taking (or not) into account the structural complexity of landscape. Three analytical approaches may be recognized on the basis of whether landscape structural attributes are involved (global, mono-attribute and multi-attribute approach). The present work is part of a research aimed to seek out rational instruments for guidance policies on rural landscape.

The Cottonwood River Watershed is located in southwestern Minnesota, draining 1,310 square miles of land within the Minnesota River Basin. The watershed is comprised of parts of Brown, Cottonwood, Lyon, Murray, and Redwood Counties. This essay gives a brief account of the initial European settlement of the area and the establishment of the current political boundaries.

The debate over sustainable intensification has hinged on private incentives to abate land degradation. Largely missing is the role of social capital in both creating incentives and removing barriers to soil conservation. Yet soil conservation embodies the externality problem that bedevils so many aspects of natural resource management. Action by one farmer to reduce water or wind erosion may benefit neighboring fields by slowing the rate of water or wind movement across those lands. Yet these benefits are not fully captured by the farmer making the conservation investment.