Russia has experienced dramatic changes in land ownership and land tenure since the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991: agricultural land has been largely privatized, individual landowners now have legal rights to most agricultural land in the country, and previous prohibitions on buying and selling of land have been removed by recent laws. The necessary preconditions for the development of agricultural land markets have been met and we are beginning to witness transactions that involve individual landowners, and not only the state.

Russia has experienced dramatic changes in land ownership and tenure since 1991, but the development of land markets is still circumscribed by inadequate administrative and technical infrastructure. The paper discusses the evolving legal framework for land reform, the impacts on privatization and ownership of agricultural land, and the emergence of land market transactions.

This study investigates the carbon sequestration potential and co-benefits from policies aimed at retiring agricultural land in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, a large, heavily agricultural area. We extend the empirical measurement of co-benefits from the previous focus on environmental benefits to include economic transfers. These transfers have often been mentioned as a co-benefit, but little empirical work measuring the potential magnitude of these transfers has previously been undertaken.

This presentation provides comparative analysis of agricultural holdings in Estonia based on the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data. The FADN data for reference years 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 have been analysed. The FADN data analyses showed, that there are very big differences in the structure of the agricultural holdings. Individual farms represent ca 92% of the total population of agricultural producers but at the same time their part in total production attains less than 50% according to the FADN data for year 2003.

This article solves and characterizes optimal decision rules to invest in irreversible land improvements conditional on land tenure insecurity. Economic model is a normative dynamic programming model with known parameters for the one period returns and transition equations. The optimal decision rules for liming are solved numerically, conditional on alternative scenarios on the likelihood that the lease contract and, thus, farmer access to land is either renewed or expired. The model parameters represent Finnish soil quality and production conditions.

Without support, the levels of agricultural public goods will fall short of the demand in high cost countries like Norway, Finland and Iceland. However, as demonstrated in this paper using Norway as a case, the current support and agricultural activity is far out of proportions from a public goods perspective. Model simulations show that at most 40% of the current support level can be defended by the public good argument. Furthermore, the present support, stimulating high production levels, is badly targeted at the public goods in question.

In recent years, numerous policy makers and educators in Michigan have advocated increasing participation of land use planning officials in land use-related education and training. The Michigan Land Use Leadership Council, commissioned by Governor Granholm, recommended that 60% of planning and zoning officials complete basic land use planning, zoning, and smart growth educational programs by 2010.

This report summarizes the 2005 results of the North Dakota Land Valuation Model. The model is used annually to estimate average land values by county, based on the value of production from cropland and non-cropland. The county land values developed from this procedure form the basis for the 2005 valuation of agricultural land for real estate tax assessment. The average “"all land value"” from this analysis is multiplied by the total acres of agricultural land on the county abstract to determine each county'’s total agricultural land value for taxation purposes.

The relative importance of income earning potential versus consumptive values in setting ranchland prices is examined using a truncated hedonic model. The market value of New Mexico ranches is related to annual income earning potential and other ranch characteristics including ranch size, location, elevation, terrain, and the amount of deeded, public, and state trust land on the ranch. We found ranch income to be a statistically important determinant of land value, but yet a relatively small percentage of ranch value was explained by income earnings.

This study summarizes an analysis of uniform, topographical and other site-specific soil fertility testing procedures based on observations of various crops at various locations in North Dakota and one location in Minnesota for 2001 through 2004. Results showed little difference in economic returns among the soil fertility testing methods by crop or location.