This paper investigates causation contemporaneously and over time to elucidate the persistent lack of agreement about what "causes" changes in farmland prices. Using recently developed causal modeling framework of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and cointegrated (VAR) techniques, the assumed causal structures of existing structural and empirical models are tested directly. The results validate concerns about the nonstationarity of these series. Land price changes are found to respond to a small subset of the oft-cited causes of price change, including macroeconomic variables.

The reform of the 90s led to the elimination of states monopoly of landownership and to the privatization of most agricultural lands. Within the small auxiliary sector of agricultural land the turnover arose in the early reform. But in the large agro-industrial sector, the turnover of lands received the necessary legal regulation only in 2003 (more than 10 years later than the mass privatization of these lands). For this type of turnover, a significant part of the regulatory mechanisms was borrowed from foreign experience, because the domestic experience was absent.

Any activities aimed at rural area development should not disregard the inhabitants who are "the tools" that implement given mechanisms. To a large extent, the effectiveness of social activities is determined by the participants’ expectations towards the projects and their knowledge of the subject. Land consolidation projects are the ideal tools for rural development. Land consolidation may be described as the planned readjustment of land ownership patterns with the aim of creating larger and more rational land holdings.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was analyzed and systematized the experience of development of rent of agricultural lands in foreign countries. One of the most important directions of land ownership rights realization is land lease – one of the most economically sensible and efficient forms of land tenure. There were established the advantages and necessary conditions for the efficient inclusion of land lease relations in the field of land tenure into market mechanisms. There was suggested a complex variant of development of the rent of lands in agricultural production.

Agricultural nitrogen is a major contributor to Gulf of Mexico hypoxia, and research has shown that agricultural subsurface tile drainage is a major carrier of nitrogen from croplands to streams and rivers. This study compares the results of abating nitrogen under a retired-land minimization policy with those of a new revenue-maximizing policy, paying particular attention to the role of tile-drained land.

In Poland significant changes in landscape intensified after the political transformation in late 1980’s. One of the signs of the changes are more transformations of agricultural land into developed land (industry, housing, services). At the same time, abandoned land started overgrowing with trees and brushwood. These are a result of changes in living and housing conditions, technical progress and changes in legislation. Local spatial plan is a planning act that defines the designation of the land in Poland.

Public preferences for nonmarket services of preserved land in Delaware are measured using two survey techniques. The results of a conjoint experiment, using a sample of 199 Delawareans, suggest that the environmental and agricultural attributes of preserved land are most important to the residents. The conjoint results also suggest that these services are of substantial value to Delawareans; at the margin, at least, agricultural and environmental preserved land provide net benefits to the public.

This report presents the results of a survey of Delaware agricultural landowners about their characteristics, opinions, and behavior regarding participation in the Delaware Agricultural Lands Preservation Program, specifically the PACE and Ag Dist programs. The results demonstrate that participants tend to:
- Own larger farms
- Be more likely to raise corn, soybeans, and vegetables
- Have more decision makers
- Be much more likely to be full-time operators
- Be more likely to value working outdoors

Nature reserve planning models to maximize species protection are typically formulated for a single period using certain data. In practice, however, parcels must be acquired over time. The status of a parcel may change due to conversion to alternate land use. Populations of species to be protected may change, as well. A two-stage stochastic program that maximizes expected species protection with annual budget constraints is proposed where parcels available for set aside have associated probabilities of being available for acquisition and species coverage.