Is Soil Bonitet an Adequate Indicator for Agricultural Land Appraisal in Ukraine?

Abstract

Agriculture land appraisal analysis is an important component of the land market. This task is especially essential for Ukraine, which plans to lift the moratorium on land transactions and legalize farmland sales in 2021. Most post-Soviet countries adopted the notion of a soil bonitet—a quantitative score representing natural soil fertility. This score is also proposed in Ukraine to perform agricultural land appraisals. However, this is a static parameter and does not account for the dynamics of actual crop production on the agricultural lands. Moreover, the bonitet score is not crop-specific. Therefore, in this study, we use maps of bonitet based on the soil map and natural-agricultural districts of Ukraine and crop yields at the village scale to explore the relationships between bonitet values and actual crop production in Ukraine. We found that land appraisal is not correlated with the actual soil bonitet.