With the rapid rise in farmland*values during recent years, farmers and farm organizations have argued that land values have little relationship to agricultural productivity. The fact that farmers have been the dominant purchasers in the farm real estate market during this period of time would seem to discredit this argument to some degree, but public officials have been sympathetic to the farmers' arguments. Some state legislatures, particularly in areas o f the country where urban expansion has placed upward pressures on land values, have adopted procedures to value farmland based on its agricultural productivity for purposes of assessing property tax.