Recent increases in farm real estate values in the United States have increased farm equity. By exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused various increases in wealth for farmers owning various shares of their farmland, we examine whether U.S. grain farmers expanded their acres harvested or acres owned in response to an increase in their land wealth. We find that land wealth had little effect on farm size. However, for similarly-sized farms, a larger ownership share (10 percentage points) led to an increase in the growth of land owned (2 percentage points).

The recent appreciation in agricultural land values across the United States has raised a number of important questions for farmers, farmland owners, lenders, and policy makers. While traditional economic theory suggests that farmland values are determined by the discounted stream of expected returns, previous research has shown that agricultural land values are actually driven by a complex set of factors.

Over the last three decades, many soil and water conservation projects have been implemented in various parts of eastern and southern Africa to control land degradation, and improve land productivity, especially under ‘catchment approach’ initiatives of the 1980s. In Ethiopia, many of these soil conservation projects were implemented following the severe drought of 1974.

BACKGROUND: Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) addresses the challenge of meeting the growing demand for food, fibre and fuel, despite the changing climate and fewer opportunities for agricultural expansion on additional lands. CSA focuses on contributing to economic development, poverty reduction and food security; maintaining and enhancing the productivity and resilience of natural and agricultural ecosystem functions, thus building natural capital; and reducing trade-offs involved in meeting these goals.

BACKGROUND: Ethiopia encompasses an extraordinary number of ecological zones and plant diversity. However, the diversity of plants is highly threatened due to lack of institutional capacity, population pressure, land degradation and deforestation. An adequate documentation of these plants also has not been conducted. The farmers in Ethiopia face serious and growing food insecurity caused by drought, land degradation and climate change. Thus, rural communities are dependent on underutilized wild edible plants to meet their food and nutritional needs.

More than 12 million people added to the poor in Pakistan between 1993 and 1999. The rising poverty was the result of poor governance and slow economic growth (Asian Development Bank 2002). All available evidence on poverty trends in Pakistan suggests that the problem of poverty in the country worsened during the 1990s, and this was more so in rural areas than in urban areas.

This study analyzes the effects of transaction costs on the size of hazelnut farms in Turkey. The study finds that higher land slope and higher variance of rain, as transaction‐cost‐increasing natural effects, lead to smaller hazelnut land holdings. High slope and weather variation can increase the costs of monitoring the laborers, make moving inputs or output up and down harder, limit the use of machinery, and reduce contractual performance of labor contracts. For farm production functions, land is a complex input with measurable interactions with nature.

Farmer-to-farmer outreach was used within a targeted watershed to promote the installation of conservation buffers. In this program called “FarmLink”, four farmers/landowners were employed part-time as “advisors” and trained by University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Natural Resources District personnel. Topics included basic buffer design and benefits, availability of incentive programs, and sales techniques. These individuals then contacted their neighbors to explain the need for and benefits of buffers and other conservation practices.

In the savanna rangelands of southern Africa, the debate about land reform tends to be about the redistribution of formerly freehold ranches and fencing-off the rangeland commons into ranches for better-off African farmers. The position of those who favour privatisation has been strengthened by the belief that the only environmentally sound way to manage the range is to subdivide it into private ranches because traditional open-range pastoralism is environmentally destructive. This point of view is at variance with an ever-increasing body of research.