A simulation model incorporating stochastic yields, prices, and government payments generates returns for landowners and tenants under cash, share, and flexible leases. Corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, peanuts, and wheat-double crop soybeans crop enterprises are studied. Alternatives are evaluated by mean returns, coefficient of variation, and certainty equivalent analysis.

Farmland values in the United States represent a major component of the farm sector balance sheet. The linkage between farmland values and agricultural debt has typically been ignored in the literature. This paper attempts to make two contributions to our understanding of farmland prices. First, building on established literature, this study examines the role of debt solvency and government payments in farmland valuation.

The report documents the creation of estimates for cropland cash rental rates in the Upper Mississippi River Basin in 1997. Although the basic data come from disparate sources, we employ a unifying estimation procedure based on the presumption that the cropland cash rental rate is an increasing function of corn yield potential. The rates are estimated at some 42,000 National Resources Inventory data points representing cropland in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

A discrete choice dynamic model was used to predict land use change for an area in Panama. Our results show not only that our modeling technique performs better than static models, but it is also superior to previous attempts to model land use change in a dynamic fashion.

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.

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

The quasi-option value (QOV) literature originated by Arrow and Fisher (1974) and by Henry (1974) is largely concerned with the analysis of two-period models of land development. Our paper extends this literature by analyzing two scenarios in which the decision to develop land is made in a multi-period and stochastic framework. In the first scenario, the development decision is indivisible. In contrast, in the second scenario, the development decision is divisible.