• Boston 7.4%
• Chicago 8.9%
• Denver 3.6%
• Las Vegas 1.5%
• Los Angeles 21.2%
• Miami 5%
• New York 27.2%
• San Diego 5.5%
• San Francisco 11.8%
• Washington DC 7.9%

On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it’s usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he’d met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. “A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay,” said the hedge fund manager. “He’s a year older than I am. We’re somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now.”

“We,” as in, his hedge fund.

It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone’s thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there’s something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad.

The pattern began to emerge sometime in 2008. “The Hedge Fund Manager Who Bought a Farm,” read the headline on one February 2008 Times of Londonpiece detailing a British hedge fund manager’s attempt to play off the rising prices of grains in order to usurp local farmland. A Financial Times piece two months later began: “Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots.” It detailed BlackRock’s then-relatively new $ 420 million Agriculture Fund, which had already swept up 2,800 acres of land.

Even Michael Burry, the now-defunct Scion Capital founder and star protagonist of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short-who bet against the housing bubble in 2008 with credit default swaps to enormous profit-gave a rare interview on Bloomberg TV last year, explaining that he’s thrown his hat into “productive agriculture land with water on site” as it’s going to be “very valuable in the future.” (Like most of those asked to comment for this story to The Observer, Burry declined to discuss his investments in farmland.)

Three years later, the purchase of farmland both in America and abroad by outside investors has increased-so much so that in February, Thomas Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, warned against the violent possibilities of a farmland bubble, telling the Senate Agriculture Committee that “distortions in financial markets” will catch the U.S. by surprise again. He would know, because he’s seeing it in his backyard: Kansas and Nebraska reported farmland prices 20 percent above the previous year’s levels and are on pace to double values in four years. A study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and released in January estimated the amount of private capital currently committed to farmland and agricultural infrastructure at $ 14 billion. It also estimated that future investments will “dwarf” what’s currently being thrown into land, by two to three times. Further down, the study makes a conservative projection that the amount of capital potentially entering the sector over the next decade will fly past $ 150 billion.

This is happening in part because investors see their play as a hedge against hyperinflation. While the rest of the world uses the current calculation of the Consumer Price Index as a proxy for the cost of goods, some farmland investors are using a different equation, one from 1980. These investors assert inflation should be calculated the way it was before the Boskin Commission’s 1996 reworking of the CPI formula-in which case, it would be much, much higher.

“The CPI supposedly today is something like 1.5 percent,” says the hedge fund manager. “We think the actual rate of inflation is something closer to 6 or 7 percent on an annual basis. It’s also not about what it’s been over the last 10 years; it’s about what it’s going to be over the next 10 years.”

So the logic is that not only is the dollar worth far less than we think it is, but everything is more expensive and will only move further in that direction. Especially food, the value of which may have risen due to population increases, especially in places like China, where a consumer-happy middle class has finally started to emerge.

The rising cost of food can be seen even in New York’s yuppiest enclaves, where prices are high to begin with. Bloomberg food critic Ryan Sutton has been running a blog called The Price Hike wherein he measures the shifting costs of food at the plate in Manhattan restaurants. Mario Batali’s Del Posto is charging 21 percent more per meal since October. Gordon Ramsay at The London? Sixty-nine percent more since last month. Michelin favorite Bouley? Forty percent. The Breslin, at the Ace Hotel? Thirty-three percent. And so on.

But farmland isn’t an option for most investors. Farming is still mostly made up of family-run businesses, in the U.S., at least. Much of the farmland being purchased in America is purchased at estate sales. Pure-play farming isn’t a readily available product.

You can invest in John Deere for equipment; you can invest in Monsanto for seeds and agricultural tech. You can even invest in Kraft, which puts the plants on the supermarket shelf. But for now, it’s difficult to invest in a one-stop-shop farm. Additionally, there isn’t much arable land out there, it’s not increasing, and the quality of the land varies from parcel to parcel. And to make money off a farmland investment, you can’t just sit on it. You have to know what to do with it. “If you farm it like we do, you can generate a yield,” says the hedge fund manager. “We think the farmland will be worth 5 to 10 percent more every year, and on top of that, you get the commodities yield.” In other words, hedge funds are growing, picking and selling corn.

Asked if the American public would eventually see a chance to invest in Old McHedgeFund’s farm one day, the manager replied in the affirmative: “Yes. Without a doubt.” He estimated it would be only a few years before this happened. Just two weeks ago, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that El Tejar SA, the world’s largest grain producer, is planning on selling $ 300 million of bonds this year before a planned IPO. The plans for the IPO will be fast-tracked pending the sale of the bonds. If farming IPOs begin to emerge en masse, then farming-already often a dicey proposition simply on the basis of its being difficult to do correctly, the volatility of the weather and the possibility of entire crops going bad-may be vulnerable to a bubble.

There is, of course, a slightly more sinister reason to develop a sudden interest in agriculture. Last year, Marc Faber recommended to anyone: “Stock up on a farm in northern Norway and learn to drive a tractor.” He sees a “dirty war” on the horizon, playing on fears of a biological attack poisoning food supplies. Those sort of fears drive capital into everything from gold (recently at an all-time high and a long-time safe haven for investors with currency concerns) to survivalist accoutrements. In this particular case, one might buy the farm in order to avoid buying the farm.

That may seem extreme, but even the lesser scenarios are frightening to some. When asked if this is an end-of-the-world situation, the hedge fund manager replied: “It really is. I tell my fiancée this from time to time, and I’ve stopped telling her this, because it’s not the most pleasant thought.” He pauses for a moment. “We just can’t keep living the way we’re living. It’ll end within our lifetime. We’re just going to run out of certain things. We’ll just have to learn how to adjust.”

For generations of Americans, It’s a Wonderful Life pretty much sums up the benefits of home ownership. George Bailey takes over his father’s savings and loan in Bedford Falls, builds Bailey Park, an idyllic affordable-housing development, and issues mortgages. In the alternative universe where George never lived, there’s no savings and loan or Bailey Park; the townspeople have fallen into debauchery as tenants of the usurious Henry Potter; and quaint Bedford Falls, now renamed Pottersville, is home to sleazy nightclubs and pawnshops.

Director Frank Capra’s vision has dominated public policy ever since. Republicans and Democrats have competed to extol home ownership as a sound investment and source of moral virtue, stability and community.

Growing up in the small-town Midwest of the 1950s and ’60s, I never questioned those precepts. In my family, mortgage payments were a sacred obligation. The idea of “throwing away money on rent,” not to mention being beholden to the whims of a landlord, seemed anathema. The few neighborhoods where people rented were indeed shabby. After I moved to New York City, it took a decade of savings, but as soon as I had a down payment, I bought an apartment.

In the wake of the real estate bubble and collapse, all of these assumptions have been called into question—and in some cases, are under attack. Decades of policies designed to foster home ownership are being reexamined, from taxpayer support for the giant mortgage agencies to the tax deduction for mortgage interest. In light of this sea change, I decided to reapproach the sacred cow of home ownership with an open mind. Does it make sense financially? Does it promote social benefits?

In some cities, the past decade has been brutal for homeowners. In Atlanta average home prices this year are the same as they were in 2000—11 years ago—according to the Case-Shiller home-price index. Nationally, the rate of appreciation in housing seems likely to return to its long-term historical average, which is only slightly higher than the rate of inflation. Purely as an investment, residential real estate is never going to outperform the stock market or many other asset classes.

Nonetheless, home ownership has historically yielded other financial benefits. “Over 75 years the mortgage system is how the middle and lower-middle class accumulated capital,” John Quigley, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “It was a system of forced savings rather than an investment per se. It was never intended to triple your money in three years.”

For the most part, the system worked as intended, enabling Americans to accumulate wealth, put their children though college and retire comfortably. Returns were enhanced by the leverage provided by the mortgage—as long as housing prices rose. But as with any asset, leverage can also magnify losses. No one can borrow 80 percent of the price of a stock, yet that amount of leverage—and even more—became routine with real estate. In the wake of the housing collapse, that notion is being reexamined. “People have not ascribed enough of a risk premium to the leverage,” says Christopher Mayer, professor of real estate at Columbia Business School.

Today, the answer to the question of whether a home is a good investment may well be “not always,” according to Stuart Gabriel, director of the Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA. Policies that increased home ownership created what Gabriel calls “transitory owners,” who ended up suffering defaults, evictions, foreclosures and other financial disruptions. “Policy that creates only temporary home ownership is bad policy,” Gabriel adds.

If the financial benefits of home ownership seem elusive in some circumstances, the social benefits are even more so. When it comes to promoting stability and other social benefits, nearly every economist I interviewed agreed that it’s difficult if not impossible to separate home ownership from other variables that correlate with desirable environments, like affluence and levels of education.

The home ownership rate in France is 57 percent; in Germany, 46 percent; and in Switzerland, just 37 percent. By comparison, it’s 67 percent in the U.S. Housing is only one variable, of course, but no one would argue that communities in France or Germany are less stable, less cohesive or more unkempt than those in the U.S. Zurich and other cities in pristine Switzerland are a far cry from Pottersville.

Once you question the notion that everyone should own a home, the policy implications are significant. As Mayer says, “Too much of current policy seems aimed at promoting consumption of housing—ever larger and more lavish homes—rather than ownership itself.” All the economists I interviewed criticized the mortgage deduction as needlessly benefiting affluent taxpayers (most low-income taxpayers don’t itemize, so they get no benefit). Most agreed it should be phased out, perhaps over 15 to 20 years to minimize the effect on housing prices.

But they also agreed that there’s a place for some government support for home ownership, primarily as a way to promote savings. Warren Buffett, who has lived for more than 50 years in a home that cost him $ 31,500, made a resonant comment on this issue in his latest letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway: “Our country’s social goal should not be to put families into the house of their dreams, but rather, to put them into a house they can afford.”