Land prices and the changing geography of southern row-crop agriculture

Abstract

The question asked in this study is in what places in the South in 1992 were land prices low enough to make it feasible to expect at least a modest positive return on the implicit asset value of land. This report attempts to provide an approximate answer to that question by using crop enterprise budgets produced by Cooperative Extension agricultural economists in various Southern states to compute prototypical returns to land, management, and risk for various major commodities in each county in the South. We then compare those returns to the average per-acre value of farm real estate in the 1992 Census of Agriculture.