Abstract

The report documents the creation of estimates for cropland cash rental rates in the Upper Mississippi River Basin in 1997. Although the basic data come from disparate sources, we employ a unifying estimation procedure based on the presumption that the cropland cash rental rate is an increasing function of corn yield potential. The rates are estimated at some 42,000 National Resources Inventory data points representing cropland in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Keywords: cropland cash rental rates, land retirement, Upper Mississippi River Basin.