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| For me, it is simple. You can't farm if you don't have any land. Owning land gives you a base that you can count on year after year.
Renting land is fine, if you can rent decent land at a fair price, you can hang onto that land year after year, and you get fair warning before it gets rented away from you or sold. Unfortunately, these pages and my neighborhood have plenty of stories about farmers who lost a 1000 acres of land without much warning.
Rented land is a challenge if you are going to do any improvements. Fix up the land and then it gets sold out from under you, or the rent gets raised. It takes a special relationship with a good landowner to make improvements fair for all parties concerned.
Owning land ties up capital. It is always hard to get land to cash flow, because the payment is greater than typical rent. A lot of land is bought figuring that it will appreciate in value, but a lot of us understand that it doesn't always work out that way.
Buying land is a risk of timing. If you buy land just before it runs up in price, and you can lock in a decent interest rate, and you get some good crops, and the price hangs in there, then you can come out smelling like a rose.
If you buy land and crop prices go down, your bubble payment comes due at the same time that interest rates hit a new peak, the section just across the road becomes available to rent for half the money it rented at last year, and land prices fall because it is tough making any money farming- then you look like a fool.
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What is your motivation to buying land
