I am trying to clarify that atm. In my research, I saw wildly different numbers from $30 to $160 per 1000 m2

It is absolutely possible, that people pay this much. I have seen this in other regions too. What I meant is, that I still don’t get how people are making profits of this. Just assuming, that you get 200$/T of wheat and are able to harvest 10t/ha, which is a lot, you still only made 800$ of a nectar if land. This does not include the costs for all the machinery and fuel. Also at a price of 1.6k/ha it is dumb to not buy it instead. If you calculate this on a time scale of 20 years you would pay 32k in lease, so to make this profitable you could buy the land up to a price of 3.2$/m2 which is quite a lot.

There are actually a lot of projects like that. They unofficially partition the land into 500 m2 parts, arrange water and electricity (some don’t arrange that either), and they sell. Thy call them hobby gardens. Do you happen to know about them?

The difference here is, that the people are forced to do everything by themselves. In my scenario people are paying you for the work of planting the crops and maybe additionally taking care of them. The thing you mentioned is also more like, that people can build shacks on it etc, since 500m2 is way to much to eat all of it that you can grow there. It also takes quite a lot of work to maintain all of this. These small sections have the advantage of the people being able to maintain it without much effort.