Alejandro Plastina, assistant professor was quoted in a June 7 ArgiNews news brief:
Rental rates for Iowa farmland increased for the first time since 2013, according to a survey conducted by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach.
Alejandro Plastina, assistant professor in economics and extension economist at ISU, said that cash rents seem to be following land values instead of expected farm profitability. Plastina said that if current prospects for corn and soybean prices don’t improve in the short run, the observed increase in cash rents for 2018 might be short-lived, and he’d expect further declines in rental rates in the coming years. In 2018, rental rates increased by 1.4 percent to $222 an acre statewide.
Alejandro Plastina also recently received two grants from the INRC:
1) "Monetizing soil health", Alejandro Plastina is the Principal Investigator, with Wendong Zhang and Marshall McDaniel as Co-PIs. And valuable strategic partners: PFI, NRCS, and Mr. Jim Jensen (Former President of the Iowa Chapter of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers and former ISU Farm Management Specialist).
2) "Improving cereal rye cover crop BMPs to increase adoption of cover crops by Iowa farmers," where Alison Robertson and Mark Litch are the PIs, and the Co-Investigators are: J. Arbuckle, Department of Sociology; Mike Castellano, Department of Agronomy; Liang Dong, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Bob Hartzler, Department of Agronomy; Erin Hodgson, Department of Entomology Andy Lenssen, Department of Agronomy; Marshall McDaniel, Department of Agronomy; Tom Moorman, USDA-ARS, NLAE; Alejandro Plastina, Department of Economics.