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Increases in expected inflation or real growth in net rental income to land have been proposed as alternative explanations of the dramatic real growth in U.S. farmland prices in the 1970s. In this paper the effect of inflation is shown to be theoretically ambiguous. An empirical analysis, using U.S. and international farmland prices, suggests that most of the real land price growth can be explained by real growth in net rental income to land. Increases in expected inflation have had a negative effect on real land prices, but the effect of inflation has been comparatively small.