With Farmland Prices Tanking, Another Bailout Could Be On The Horizon

Mean reversion can at times be nasty. As farmland prices have been rising for most of the previous 20 years, a downtrend is now emerging. What is odd in the supply and demand continuum is that as farmers enjoy bumper crops they are at some of the most financially depressed times in the group’s history.  In this environment of falling land values and farmer hardships, rents charged to farmers have held steady and a credit crunch is compounding problems.

With bumper crop depressing prices farmers caught in financial pickle

Several years ago during the commodity boom, American farmers expanded production by leveraging rented land. Other farmers cashed out by selling their farmland when prices where high. These were the cash-rich salad...