Method and sources
The NASS data, how it's checked, and our calculations.
Our method Where the numbers come from
Every dollar figure on this site starts from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Quick Stats economics file, which NASS posts on its large datasets page under a dated file name. Our collector keeps the survey rows for land values (farm real estate, cropland, irrigated and non-irrigated cropland, pasture, and the total value of land and buildings) and cash rents (cropland, irrigated and non-irrigated cropland, pasture) for the United States, the ten NASS regions and the states, plus the county cash rents for 2026 and 2021. We keep each VALUE and CV_% exactly as NASS prints it, with its LOAD_TIME.
At every check our checker downloads NASS's current file (on October 19 that was qs.economics_20261017.txt.gz, sha256 cf06977e33f033b7…) and confirms that all 23,311 records we publish are still there with the same VALUE and CV_%. It also matches the state, region and U.S. values per acre for 2022 to 2026, and the total values for 2021 to 2025, against the tables of the Land Values 2026 Summary, and it re-finds every quoted sentence on its source page. The build stops if any of that fails.
Our calculations are labeled "ours" wherever they appear: percent changes, the cropland-to-pasture multiple, irrigated gaps, shares of the U.S. total, counts, medians and percentiles, and the rent-to-value ratio. The ratio is a NASS cash rent per acre divided by a NASS value per acre, times 100, for the same geography, year and land category. It's never computed across levels (a county rent over a state value), and it's gross: no taxes or costs. Nothing is adjusted for inflation.
Download agricultural statistics large datasets using .gz files.
A concatenation of six columns: commodity_desc, class_desc, prodn_practice_desc, util_practice_desc, statisticcat_desc, and unit_desc.
Published data value or suppression reason code.
Date and time indicating when record was inserted into Quick Stats database.
The numeric year of the data.
Ratio of the standard error to the estimate, expressed as a percent.
What this site leaves out
NASS's land value estimates are published for the United States and by state (quoted on the land value method page), so the site has no county land values. Alaska and Hawaii are outside the land value survey; Hawaii has cash rents, so it appears in the rent tables only. Rows NASS withholds (D) or doesn't publish stay blank, and we don't estimate them.
2/ Excludes Alaska and Hawaii.
(D) Withheld to avoid disclosing data for individual operations.
S Insufficient number of reports to establish an estimate.
Sources
| Publisher | Page | Our last check |
|---|---|---|
| USDA NASS | Land Values 2026 Summary (NASS, July 2026) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS / ESMIS | Agricultural Land Values publication page (ESMIS) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | Land Values Methodology and Quality Measures (NASS, September 2025) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | Cash Rents Methodology and Quality Measures (NASS, 2026) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | Cash Rents survey page (NASS) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | Quick Stats Glossary (NASS) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | Quick Stats column definitions (NASS) | October 19 |
| USDA NASS | NASS large datasets page | October 19 |