Landscape Complexity and Farmland Values

Efforts to increase crop yields and make farming more efficient have led to largerscale production and more simplified agricultural landscapes. This raises an important question: do landowners prefer the efficiency gains of simple, large scale farming systems, or the long term ecological benefits that come from more diverse and complex landscapes? This paper aims to explore the effect of complex landscapes on farmland valuation in Iowa. We utilize 2008-2018 county-level panel data with information on landscape complexity, farmland values and other soil, weather and economic controls. We apply linear fixed effect models and a number of robustness checks in the empirical analysis( i.e., alternate specifications, study area, land value and complexity measures). Our results suggest that counties with higher landscape complexity tends to have lower farmland valuation. Findings suggest that agricultural land markets value the short term efficiency gains with less complex landscapes rather than the long term ecological benefits from complex landscapes. The results show that both ecological and economic trade-offs should be considered when making land-use decisions or designing policies to support more diverse and sustainable agricultural landscapes. This study contributes to the literature by providing one of the first empirical assessments linking ecological landscape structure to asset pricing in agricultural land markets.