Local Factors in Changing Land-Tenure Patterns

Abstract

An examination of changing patterns of land tenure in a four- section area of Lake Prairie Township, south-central Iowa, reveals that land prices followed similar trends at all scales and were largely controlled by macroscale forces. Discontinuity existed between regional and local trends in farm-tenure structure. Microscale phenomena like age structure, ethnicity, and local values were the important determinants of landownership change at the local level. COMMUNITYWIDE social patterns in the rural United States affect farm systems. These patterns are especially evident among ethnically and religiously homogeneous groups who reside in agricultural regions of the Midwest. These localized value systems influence capitalization of farm enterprises, the commercial character of a farm, and farmers' risk-reduction strategies. More importantly, these value systems have led to communitywide patterns of strategies for intergenerational land transfers, the effectiveness of which is the sustainability of the farm unit. Inasmuch as landuse is tied to ownership, the continued re-creation of the farm enterprise may also be related. The goal of this article is to expand the scope of previous studies by demonstrating a methodology for analyzing local tenure patterns in the context of their interaction with larger forces. Changes in land tenure are examined for four sections or four square miles of land in Lake Prairie Township, south-central Iowa, from settlement in the 1840s to the early 1980s. These sections, part of an area settled by Dutch immigrants, contain a variety of land classes and are bounded on the northeast by a main highway and railroad and on the southwest by Red Rock reservoir on the Des Moines River (Fig. 1). County-deed records, which contain a century and a half of data on all land transactions in the four sections, form the basis of the study. The study draws on information regarding land prices; categories of transactions, such as free exchange, intrafamilial sale, inheritance, or fore- closure; types of buyers or sellers, such as private, corporate, or governmental; residence of buyers and sellers; and relationships among buyers and sellers. These data were supplemented by cemetery records and by family and oral histories. Changes in these aspects of land tenure were compared with county and regional data to analyze the interactions between the specific and the general and to assess which factors were tied to externally driven, macrosocial phenomena and which were connected with locally determined, microsocial