On the growth process of US agricultural land

In this article, we show that the growth process of US county-level farmland is remarkably consistent with the Gibrat’s law of proportionate effect, an empirical regularity frequently observed across various disciplines. This implies farmland grows proportionately over time (farmlands, whether large or small, on average grow at similar rates) and that there is little empirical support for the presence of diseconomies of size for US farmland. Granted that a random multiplicative growth is the prevalent attribute of models explaining the genesis of power laws, confirmation of Gibrat’s law also offers a possible explanation for the emergence of a power law in the distribution of US county-level farmland size.