The Oil Drum

I tend to agree also for people looking for land more for personal farms you probably are looking for more of a mixed type acreage. I expect that a lot of people that now live on mini farms but have debt and are dependent on their jobs for income to try and sell as job/fuel pressures make "toy" farms unpractical. This will have a negative impact on land prices in general. Next commercial oil base farming will get squeezed like any other business and a lot of farmers are in debt so farmer bankruptcies will lower land values. Almost all the pressure on land prices has come from expansion of suburbia not the need of land for agriculture. So even if land was needed to expand agriculture the price points one would need to make it profitable to expand given the above are much lower than they are today. So a purely agricultural induced increase in land prices is at best in some far of distant future.

Short term I'd have to think that as long as oil supply is stable and we go into a recession we will see a pull back in oil prices which will probably cut the throat of the ethanol boom this coupled with the collapse of suburban expansion will probably lead to a collapse in land prices. I just can't see land prices remaining high give the general economic situation. The other choice that oil supply drops sharply and the economy slows with high oil prices still indicates to me that land prices will drop a lot.