ABSTRACT
Adequacy of agricultural land is not an all-or-none question, but rather a relative one. Crosson chooses the real economic cost of land as the indicator of adequacy and predicts that it will rise in the next quarter century. This increase represents a continuation of the upward trend of the capitalized value of annual rents from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. It is derived by combining the independent projections of (1) demand for cropland, (2) the potential supply of cropland, and (3) technical change (expressed as crop yields). In the chapter by Martin Abel, the increase in output required is estimated to grow at the rate (annual compound) of 1.8 percent, resulting in an increase of approximately 56 percent in the next quarter century.
