The Oaken cropland cash rent calculator helps a farmland landlord and tenant agree on a fair per-acre cash rent for cropland. A flexible, data-driven approach weighs soil productivity, expected crop yields, grain prices, and production costs so that rent reflects actual farming economics instead of a fixed guess. Enter your farm name, your name and email, choose whether you are growing one or two crops, name the crops, and the calculator builds a worksheet with per-crop acres, yields, prices, and costs. Iowa farms can also select a county to apply the CSR2 soil-index method.
This farm lease calculator follows the Iowa State University Extension Ag Decision Maker File C2-20, Computing a Cropland Cash Rental Rate (authors William Edwards and Ann Johanns). The worksheet is a standard reference across the Corn Belt for setting cropland cash rent.
Rent is computed six ways — Expected Yield, Share of Gross Value, Share of Gross Revenue, Return on Investment, Shared Risk-Return, and Tenant's Residual — each producing a per-acre figure. The cropland cash rental rate estimator then summarizes them as a weighted-average range (max, min, average) across your crop acreage so you can see the full spectrum of defensible rents.
For Iowa farms, the Corn Suitability Rating 2 (CSR2) soil productivity index is multiplied by a per-index-point rental rate to estimate a baseline cash rent. County average CSR2 values are computed from NRCS Web Soil Survey data. The CSR2 method and county averages are shown only for Iowa farms.
Each rent method produces a per-acre number; the calculator weights these by crop acreage to report a max, min, and average across the whole farm. This range gives landlords and tenants a defensible band for negotiation rather than a single rigid figure.
A cropland cash rental rate is the per-acre cash rent paid to farmland owners for the use of cropland for one growing season. It is negotiated between the landlord and tenant and is influenced by soil productivity, expected crop yields, grain prices, production costs, and local market conditions.
The Iowa State University Extension Ag Decision Maker File C2-20, Computing a Cropland Cash Rental Rate, estimates rent multiple ways: Expected Yield, Share of Gross Value, Share of Gross Revenue, Return on Investment, Shared Risk-Return, and Tenant's Residual. These methods are then summarized as a weighted-average range across the farm's crop acreage.
The Corn Suitability Rating 2 (CSR2) is a soil productivity index from 5 to 100 maintained by Iowa State University. The C2-20 worksheet multiplies a county's average CSR2 by a per-index-point rental rate to estimate a baseline cash rent. This cropland rent estimator applies the CSR2 method only for Iowa farms, using county average CSR2 values computed from NRCS Web Soil Survey data.
Enter your farm name, your name and email, choose whether you are growing one or two crops, name the crops, and provide crop acres, expected yields, grain prices, and per-acre production costs. Iowa farms can also select their county to apply the CSR2 method.
The estimator is an educational and negotiation tool that replicates the published ISU AgDM C2-20 methodology. It uses the inputs you provide and does not pull live market data. Always verify figures with current USDA NASS data and your own farm records before signing a lease.
Oaken centralizes lease agreements, payments, and landowner relationships for farm managers, investors, and CPAs.
