Purdue Agricultural Economics Report

The Purdue Agricultural Economics Report (PAER) exists to serve and further the core mission of the department to engage with real world problems that are of value to stakeholders. The scholarship communicated in this publication will represent the department’s excellence in creative endeavor for new knowledge and its dissemination in the economics of agriculture and natural resources.

Recent Publication:

2026-08 PAER: Purdue Farmland Values and Cash Rent Survey Results

August 17, 2026

Indiana farmland prices remained relatively stable in 2026, with modest rises and falls across quality grades, according to the latest Purdue Farmland Values and Cash Rents Survey. The average price of top quality farmland reached $14,909 per acre, up 0.6% from June 2025. In contrast, average quality farmland declined 1.1% to $12,121 per acre, while poor quality farmland fell 3.1% to $9,460 per acre. The relatively small statewide changes, however, mask significant differences across Indiana’s regions and farmland quality grades.

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Articles:

Publication Date: August 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-14

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade;

Summary: This is a targeted policy aimed at a narrow slice of the beef market — imported product for ground beef, much of which is lean processing beef — rather than a broad intervention in the fed-cattle market. It was announced in response to historically tight cattle supplies and unusually high beef prices. Within that narrow lane, the most plausible effect is some additional availability of lower-cost processing beef and some downward pressure on ground-beef prices.
Publication Date: August 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-13

Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade; Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group

Summary: Energy prices are 14.7 percent above year-ago levels, and yet the raw agricultural commodities that sit at the head of the food pipeline are cheaper than they were last July. That combination is the whole story of this month’s release — but it is not evidence that the energy shock missed agriculture.
Publication Date: August 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-24

Todd Kuethe, Schrader Chair in Farmland Economics & Professor of Agricultural Economics

Summary: In sum, state-level aggregate farmland prices exhibited relatively modest changes from 2025 to 2026. Respondents suggest that the majority of market forces are placing downward pressure on farmland prices, so it is not surprising that they expect modest declines through the remainder of 2026.
Publication Date: August 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-25

Michael Langemeier, Director, Center for Commercial Agriculture & Professor of Agricultural Economics

Summary: This paper computes a ratio equivalent to the P/E ratio for farmland, the farmland price-to-cash-rent ratio (P/rent), and discusses trends in the P/rent ratio.
Publication Date: July 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-12

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade

Summary: June’s CPI and PPI both cooled, and the cooling reaches all the way back to Stage 1 — consistent with a genuine, if possibly temporary, easing of the energy shock rather than a one-month statistical blip. But most of the movement inside the food basket this month — dairy’s reversal, the citrus and lettuce climate stories, the tomato tariff baseline, Brazil’s coffee cycle, and the beef–pork divergence — traces to category-specific supply and policy dynamics that would be happening with or without the conflict.
Publication Date: July 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-11

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade; David Ubilava, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Sydney

Summary: A potential record El Niño is now forecast with high model consensus; the spring predictability barrier has been crossed; and we are within the critical agricultural windows for the most exposed crop systems.
Publication Date: June 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-10

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade

Summary: The May 2026 CPI and PPI data, read together, tell a coherent and analytically arresting story: quiet at the shelf, loading at record rates upstream.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-09

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade

Summary: The conflict’s direct impact on farm profitability in the 2026 crop year is likely to be modest and uneven. A more significant farm-level reckoning is coming in 2027 if Strait of Hormuz restrictions persist into the fall 2026 input purchasing and spring 2027 planting cycles.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-08

Caitlinn Hubbell, Market Research Analyst; Joe Balagtas, Professor of Agricultural Economics

Summary: Hubbell and Balagtas examine data from 2025 and explain the factors that drove changes to food prices. Looking forward, they discuss projections for food prices in 2026 and the policies and events that will affect them.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-07

Laura Montenovo, Assistant Professor

Summary: Medicaid expansion represents a major injection of federal dollars into local economies. This new brief from Montenovo highlights research on the role of ACA expansion in directing federal funds toward high-need, low-income U.S. counties.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-15

Carson Reeling, Graduate Program Chair, Professor of Agricultural Economics

Summary: If you had asked me at the beginning of 2025 what this report would look like in the first few months of 2026, my thoughts might not have been safe to print. Now that it is the first few months of 2026, however, I am happy to report that, despite my dire predictions, things are just fine in the Department of Agricultural Economics graduate programs.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-16

Marley Heritier, Master’s Student; Kenneth Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics; Nicole Olynk Widmar, Department Head and Professor of Agricultural Economics; Amanda Dickson

Summary: Identifying the chocolate attribute preferences of local consumers can stimulate demand and further grow the sector. Understanding these preferences is crucial for local producers to align their products with consumer expectations, ensuring the industry’s sustainability and potential expansion into other markets.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-17

Ivanna Carrillo-Siller, PhD Student and Graduate Research Assistant

Summary: This article examines gender differences in self-employment composition and outcomes across the Midwest. It finds that while non-family businesses dominate overall, women are more concentrated in lower-profit firms, with family businesses playing a central role in higher earnings and intra-household caregiving distribution.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-18

Laxmi D. Adhikari, PhD Student and Graduate Research Assistant; Bhagyashree Katare, Berdine Martin Food Economics Associate Professor; and Maria I. Marshall, James and Lois Ackerman Professor of Agricultural Economics

Summary: Mental health issues are a bigger challenge in rural areas and often worsened by limited access to care, stigma and workplace constraints. This study highlights the prevalence of common mental health issues among rural employees and underscores the need for targeted strategies that meet the unique needs of rural small business employees.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-19

Binayak Kunwar, PhD Student and Graduate Research Assistant; Chad Fiechter, Assistant Professor, Agricultural Finance; Guy Tchuente, Assistant Professor, Quantitative Methods in Spatial Analysis; and Aaron Shew, Chief Technology Officer at Acres

Summary: State-led farmland purchases can influence land prices beyond the parcels directly acquired. Using Indiana’s LEAP District as a case study, this report shows that public land acquisition significantly increased local farmland prices and affected neighboring counties, with important implications for farmers and policymakers.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-20

Lauren Benavidez-Brouk, PhD Student; Farzad Taheripour, Research Professor of Agricultural Economics; Uris Baldos, Research Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics; Qianlai Zhuang, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Agronomy; Shuo Chen, PhD Student

Summary: How much do soil maps matter for climate policy? Quite a lot. We find that differences across major global SOC databases can translate into significant changes in land-use emission estimates, making SOC baseline choice a critical part of agricultural policy analysis.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-21

Anabeth Jennings, MS Student; Maksym Chepeliev, Research Associate Professor

Summary: The Role of Phosphorus in Global Food Systems and Its Link to Food Loss and Waste Agriculture has become reliant on phosphorus (P), a non-renewable resource essential for plant growth (Cordell et al., 2009; Scholz & Wellmer, 2015). Furthermore, there
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-22

Yuansen Li, PhD Student

Summary: The synthetic control method (SCM) is a widely used causal inference approach for panel data settings in which only a single unit is exposed to treatment.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAER-2026-23

Sampada Wagle, MS Student

Summary: Immigrant labor constitutes a substantial portion of the US meat and poultry processing workforce. However, the downstream effects of deportations targeting these immigrants on their food safety practices remain largely unexamined. We provide novel empirical evidence on the relationship between deportations, labor dynamics in the industry, and safety practices in the meat and poultry processing sector.
Publication Date: May 2026
Article ID: PAERPB-2026-06

Ken Foster, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director, Purdue Farm Policy Study Group; Bernhard Dalheimer, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics and Trade; Roman Keeney, Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics and Extension Coordinator

Summary: Three forces interact to shape the 2026 commodity price outlook: (1) the trade policy headwind created by tariffs and retaliatory measures that suppress the transmission of supply tightening into higher U.S. export prices; (2) a biofuel demand tailwind that works through domestic markets and is strengthened by elevated oil prices and renewable fuels policy; and (3) the emerging El Niño climate pattern that elevates production uncertainty in both the U.S. and global crops.