One of the main groups in agriculture is plant cultivation. The crop production combines growing of grain, cotton, vegetable, viticulture, tobacco cultivation, etc. One of the main factors in the activities of plant-growing as well as in grain-growing is the efficient using of land. Agriculture is characterized by number of specific socio-economic, natural and technological characteristics. Unlike other sectors of the economy, the main means of production is land. Land differs from other agricultural production facilities. Land is not a product of human activity, it is the product of nature. The land area cannot be increased nor decreased as other means of production, its natural fertility and productivity can be increased. Land area has been divided into zones according to its location, quality and rating. Agricultural farming on unfavourable land areas requires more funds than on favourable land plots. In the article, using grain crops efficiency data, increase of soil fertility and issues in the direction of increasing productivity facing entrepreneurial farms were studied.

The result of the long existence of legal restrictions on the agricultural land market in Ukraine was the formation of a specific leasehold system of land use. Agricultural enterprises and farms do not have land owned. Instead, the peasants who became owners of land during the distribution of collective farms, mostly do not process these parcels of land on their own, but also deprived of the right to alienate them (to sell, give, change). The study shows the development of leased land use of agricultural enterprises in Ukraine, which currently covers 16.8 million hectares of private land and about 1 million hectares of state-owned land. Since 2003, the civil law of Ukraine permitted to apply not only the lease of agricultural land, but also the emphyteusis right (the alienated right to use someone’s land for agricultural purposes), the process of transformation of lease into emphyteusis was started, especially in large agricultural holdings. The main advantages of emphyteusis as a substantive law and its attractiveness for agribusiness are considered. The suggestions on improving the legal regulation of land use under conditions of emphyteusis are given.

The zones of ecological trouble cover about 15% of the territory of Russia, where the main production capacities and the most productive agricultural lands are concentrated. The Samara region is characterized by a distinct natural zonality from a typical forest-steppe in the North with a forest cover close to 30%, to an open dry steppe in the South with a natural forest cover of only 0.1...0.2%. The article presents an analysis of land use in the Samara region on the example of the Borsky municipal district. Research methods include environmental analysis and statistical data analysis.The article presents an analysis of the land use of the Borskiy municipal district. During zoning, the territory of the district is divided into the northern, central and southern parts. Assessment of environmental and economic parameters showed heterogeneity of the territory and the need for detailed consideration of climatic, soil, economic conditions in the design of landscape optimization systems, even in the municipal area. In general, the district's land fund experiences an average anthropogenic load, the ecological stability of the territory as a whole is characterized as unstable stable. In comparison with other areas of the Central MES, the municipal Borskiy district belongs to the category with an average ecological intensity with a stabilization index of 0.59 units due to the beneficial influence of the Buzuluksky area.

Starting in 2016, the process of financial decentralization began in Ukraine, in which local governments of lower levels (rural, urban, city councils and united territorial communities) were entitled to independently establish on their territory the rates of many local taxes and fees credited to community budgets. In particular, tax legislation of Ukraine allows local governments to vary land tax rates in the range from 0.1 to 3% of the normative monetary valuation of land, as well as to differentiate tax rates depending on the type of intended use of land plots. The study created a database and analysed the spatial heterogeneity of land tax rates in more than 9.6 thousand communities. It is shown how the level of tax burden on land owners and land users, established by local self-government bodies, correlates with the economic development of the regions, as well as the normative monetary valuation of land, which is used in Ukraine as a tax base. The problems of taxation of real estate, which arise at the separate collection of land tax and tax for real property other than land, are considered, as well as suggestions on the necessity of introduction of tax zoning of territories in Ukraine, which will allow to further differentiate the rates of taxes on the property and provide more flexible and adaptive taxation of real estate.

The solution of preserving and restoring the soil fertility problem of agricultural lands in the process of economic activity is one of the main tasks in achieving global food security. Implementation of a complex of soil protection measures, as a rule, ensures the preservation and even growth of soil fertility. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to determine the economic efficiency of introducing soil protection measures in the use of agricultural land. For this purpose, the following tasks were set and solved: the analysis of the current state and trends of the land resources use in agriculture; to investigate the tendencies of carrying out measures on preservation of soil fertility and prevention of its degradation; to substantiate scientific and methodical estimation principles of economic efficiency of introduction of soil protection measures in the conditions of Ukraine. The following basic methods were used to solve the research objectives: monographic analysis – when developing scientific publications on environmentally friendly use of agricultural land; comparative and statistical analysis – in studying the dynamics of the structure of the land fund of Ukraine by main types of land and economic activity; system-structural analysis and grouping – in the study of the nature and content of ecological and economic consequences of soil degradation, as well as approaches to assessing the economic effectiveness of soil protection measures; economic analysis and calculation of relative indicators – to evaluate the economic efficiency of soil protection measures in the process of agricultural land use; abstract-logical method − for theoretical generalizations and conclusions formation, etc. Established that soil degradation is now one of the most important industrial and environmental issues, which is the main reason for the inability to achieve high rates of environmental and economic efficiency of land use in the future. It was also substantiated scientific and methodical approach to determining the economic efficiency of soil conservation measures in the current market conditions, which is based on the additional income that is received as a result of increase crop yields on protected lands. It is established that effective protection of soils from degradation is possible with the systematic implementation of soil protection measures complex, developed taking into account the specific natural and economic conditions of each region or agricultural enterprise. The priority directions of realization measures on land protection are given.

According to the official statistics the areas of abandoned agricultural land in Lithuania are gradually decreasing, but very slightly. The aim of this study is to research spatial determination and abandoned land classification in the territory of Vilnius District Municipality. Vilnius District Municipality was chosen for the research because it, although located near the capital of the country and has a high population density, it is still the district having the largest percent of abandoned land plots. A fast, cost-effective and sufficiently accurate method for determination of abandoned land plots would allow to constantly monitoring, to fix changes and foresee the abandoned land plots reduction possibilities. In the study there was used the multispectral RGB and NIR colour Sentinel-2 satellite images, the layer of the administrative boundary of Vilnius County and layer of abandoned agriculture land, which is available in Lithuanian Spatial Information Portal (www.geoportal.lt). The data was processed by Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques using classical classification Region Growing Algorithm. The research shows that NIR image classification result is more reliable than the result from RGB images.