> It is going to sidle a cost to an industry of razor thin margins.
Will it or will farmland value take a dump but remain unchanged in use?
I always thought of farmland these days as a use of last resort and if it could be marketable for buildings, it’s already not economically worth it as a farm except speculatively
In the U.K. farmland has a rental value of about £100 an acre but a purchase price over £10k an acre.
The value in the land isn’t in its use (which is getting 1% ROI), but in speculation it may be granted permission to be converted to housing, or because of tax loopholes.
The owner also get capital appreciation / depreciation of the land - ~5.7 per cent per annum over the last 100 years bring the total return to a 6.7% ROI.
Land at the edge of cities and towns where there is a reasonable chance of development happening costs orders of magnitude more than the average.
The person renting that land then farms it (presumably for a profit) for additional ROI.
Yes, this came up in the recently closed inheritance tax loophole; people were buying "family farms" purely to leave to their children while doing the minimum of farming.
Yes speculation and tax avoidance. Neither of which are behaviours we want to encourage.