Farmland Investment Decisions

It is interesting to note that there appears to be an increase in the use of dynamic program-ming in agricultural economics research. In both papers (Schnitkey, Taylor, and Barry; Gustafson), stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) is employed to examine an agricultural economics problem. The authors attempt the kind of empirical research that, I believe, ag-ricultural economists should be engaged in. Nonetheless, I have some reservations about both papers. I will start with the paper by Schnitkey, Taylor, and Barry (hereafter STB), followed by the paper by Gustafson