Agriculture's Boom-Bust Cycles: Is This Time Different?

Abstract

U.S. agriculture is notorious for its boom and bust cycles. During the past 100 years, shifts in U.S. agricultural export activity triggered fluctuations in agricultural profits. Soaring wartime food demand during the 1910s and 1940s boosted U.S. agricultural exports and farm prosperity. A spike in U.S. agricultural exports during the 1970s sparked another surge in U.S. farm incomes. At the same time, low interest rates quickly translated rising incomes into booming farmland values, especially during the 1910s and 1970s when farmers used debt to finance their investments. These golden eras of a booming farm economy, however, quickly faded as economic and financial market conditions changed. Today, U.S. agriculture is in the midst of another farm boom. Farm incomes are swelling due to record high exports and strong biofuels demand. Simultaneously, with historically low interest rates, farmland values have soared to record highs. While current conditions echo the rhythms of the past, farmers have hesitated to accumulate debt in financing new investments, raising the possibility that this time could be different.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.