Philip, your post brings to mind one thing that's always been a bit of a mystery to me. You mention two ways to determine the value of land: production value and rental value. I've always thought there was another, and equally valid, way of determining something's worth. For instance, When my mom died, she owned a 35-acre ranch, a very unique property with creek frontage and irrigated fields and end-of-road privacy, and so on. We had a couple of appraisers tell us what they thought of it, but in the end I always came back to the same idea: the land's value is what you can get someone to pay you for it. If someone looking for property comes across a place that they absolutely fall in love with, and must have, they then value the place more (and hopefully fork over more cash for) than someone else who doesn't love it as much. Right? I've always thought that the "value" of land or a homestead was really highly subjective, and that the whole business of appraising was almost pointless.