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Re: Appraising Certified Organic Land



> Had a call from a banker today asking if I knew of anyone who could
> tell him if land had greater value because of its being certified
> organic. 

Some of the conventional boys in the Midwest just love to get their 
mitts on a piece of organic land because they can farm it to the hilt 
for several years and take advantage of the potent response obtained 
by adding farm chemicals to healthy, resilient land.  Usually they 
try to rent it, not buy it, so they can dump it after five years when 
the productivity's gone.

It's the same production response phenomenon that in the early 1950s 
convinced people that farm chemicals were miraculous -- but that's 
another whole story.

What I'd like to know is *WHY* the banker even cares about land 
'value' at all in this circumstance.  He should be lending on *cash 
flow* not book value, but maybe he's too young to remember 1982.

I'm astounded that farmers and bankers still get themselves in 
trouble by looking at book value instead of the innate productive 
capacity of the land and the ability of the farmer to plan for profit 
by keeping costs of production down in relation to yield.  That's 
something a lot of good organic farmers do, but in my experience it 
doesn't seem to rub off on their soil, which for some reason 
stubbornly insists on maintaining its fundamental strengths and 
weaknesses regardless of who is bumbling along on the surface....


=============================================================================
Bart Hall,  National Center for Appropriate Technology
PO Box 3657,    Fayetteville, Arkansas, 72702, USA
501-442-9824           barth@ncatfyv.uark.edu

"Restore the real meaning of words, to live in Truth."     Vaclav Havel
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