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Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate how land tenure correlates with measures of profitability among young farmers and ranchers in the United States. The authors hypothesize that young producers who own a larger proportion of their operation face different incentives between short- and long-run returns than young producers who primarily rent their land. The authors analyze whether these differing incentives result in observable differences in various measures of profitability. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use state-level data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) from 2003 to 2018 to estimate fixed-effects panel models correlating land tenure with the value of farm production, expenditures on repairs and maintenance, net farm income, total operator household income from farming, rate of return on assets (ROA) and rate of return on equity (ROE). Findings: The authors find different correlations for crop farms and livestock farms, as well as different correlations for farms with the lowest and highest gross sales. For crop farms, renting land is associated with higher production, higher income, higher ROA and higher ROE. For livestock farms, renting land is associated with lower production. Originality/value: This study rigorously investigates the role of land tenure specifically among young farmers and ranchers in the United States. By better understanding how land ownership affects profitability among beginning farmers and ranchers, policymakers will be able to better target public resources to support the next generation of producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Are property rights merely a tool of the market economy, disempowering those with the least in rural places and further lining the pockets of those with the most? Most rural scholarship, on the aggregate, argues that yes, property rights dispossess the many in favor of the few. We, though, find the situation to be much more nuanced in our analysis of U.S. right-to-farm laws, the first of its kind. An overlooked dimension of property rights—the capacity to claim trespass on property through nuisance—enables rural people to defend their rights to clean air and water and the use and enjoyment of their property in the face of large-scale, industrial agricultural operators. Our analysis of statutes in all 50 U.S. states finds that right-to-farm laws, while largely purported to defend family farmers, reduce rural people's capacity to protect their land through nuisance actions in defense of their environmental, health, and community rights. We argue that property rights, when properly protected from nuisance, can help rural people push back against the market economy in defense of their health and environmental rights when other political means falter. Recognizing as much helps reveal a relationship between property rights and justice that currently is overlooked by rural scholars. Highlights • Rural studies could benefit from paying more attention to how property rights are used, in addition to who owns the land. • Nuisance suits, governed by Right-to-Farm laws, increasingly define whose property rights matter in the countryside. • Right-to-Farm laws elevate the property rights of absentee agribusiness at the expense of those who live in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). Because older farmers own more of the land that they farm, greater land appreciation slows the rate at which younger farmers acquire land relative to older farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Land development decisions in the rural-urban fringe are primarily made by small-scale merchant builders who have little economic incentive to adhere to metropolitan plans. Local governments have little power to regulate land use, and as a result American cities have uncoordinated sprawling suburbs. A shift from small-scale development to large-scale new community development might eliminate some of the problems caused by sprawl, but it is difficult and expensive to assemble large holdings of land adjacent to a city. Prince Georges County, a suburb of Washington D.C., had fragmented land ownership and high land values adjacent to the urbanized area in 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early 20th century the Department of the Interior strived to enhance the public domain and to aid homesteaders in their bid to settle on newly opened lands. In a number of areas, including the plantation belt of northeastern Arkansas, these efforts ran into serious obstacles. The sunken lands and swamps located near the St. Francis River began to be drained by state and local government agencies. Prominent local businessmen and big landowners raised the issue of riparian rights which, they maintained, granted them legal right to large tracts of the reclaimed land adjacent to their own property. A legal battle followed, culminating in the Supreme Court's 1917 'United States' v. 'Wilson' decision that the land belonged to the federal government. But the wording of the decision also led to its undoing; it gave supporters of riparian rights an opportunity to gain ownership through legislation. This route was pursued by the large landowners with great success. Although the total acreage available for farming in northeastern Arkansas soared, most remained in the hands of the plantation owners.