Project Details
Projekt
Quantifying the concentration of land ownership and trade-offs in agriculture
Subject Area
Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317374551
Growing competition for agricultural land has resulted in rising land prices, larger average farm sizes, and a higher concentration of land ownership and more intense land use. While higher land-use intensity raised agricultural output, the intensification has also been associated with negative environmental effects and reduced rural employments opportunities. In this project we assess two key outcomes of the growing competition for land: First, we examine the concentration of land ownership, its association with land use, and if higher ownership concentration is associated with distorted prices for agricultural land. We will use official cadastral data to quantify and map ownership patterns and their changes, calculate the share of owned and rented land by intersecting parcel-level land ownership with plot-level land use, and use matching statistics to examine if ownership concentration has affected land prices. Second, we explore how the competition for land affected biodiversity and rural employment. To do so, we will quantify the trade-offs between crop yields, biodiversity, and rural employment using spatially optimization tools. The spatial optimisation of the three objectives allows to generate and map pareto-efficient solutions along a pareto frontier. We will examine how the trade-offs vary for different ownership characteristics, farm sizes, and between conventional and organic farms. The project will target all agricultural land in the federal state of Brandenburg in Germany at fine spatial resolution. Brandenburg is an interesting case to examine the effects of rising land competition because the state is characterised by a growing demand from consumers in Berlin for regionally sourced and organic products, has a substantial production of land-based bioenergy, and a large share of land dedicated to nature conservation. The project outcomes will provide much-needed methodological advances in geospatial analysis of fine-scale, multidimensional datasets for large areas, advance the knowledge about land-system dynamics in a region that experiences high competition for land resources, and produce salient insights on policy-relevant land-use outcomes. We will generate, for the first time, wall-to-wall maps of ownership patterns in agriculture, the share owned and rented lands, and identify and characterize land-use trade-offs. Our project is highly interdisciplinary, situated at the interface between agricultural economics, sustainability science, land system science, and geoinformation science. Hence we greatly benefit from collaboration in the proposed research unit and will supplement other subprojects with spatial data and geostatistical expertise.
DFG Programme
Research Units
