Across the country, farms scheduled to become housing developments have come full circle and are producing crops again, according to azcentral.com (via Housing Doom).

According to The Real Deal, this trend has led to some great deals for farmers:

A dairy farming family paid $8 million in September for a 760-acre field in Arizona that a real estate developer had paid $40.8 million for just six years earlier. A 430-acre swatch of cotton fields in the state was recently reacquired for $1.75 million by the same family that sold it in 2009 for $8.6 million.

In Arizona, 250,300 acres of farmland were converted to development land from 2002 to 2007, fourth most in the country.

But the post-real estate bubble years have seen the state's cotton acreage rise from 136,000 in 2008 to 261,000 this year.

The land has either dropped in value or developers have decided to hold off construction until the market picks up again. Until then, developers are increasingly renting out the land to the farmers who once worked it, since tax rates on agricultural land are lower than for commercial or housing plots.

Nationally, farmland decreased by 13.6 million acres from 2005 to 2009, and increased by 200,000 acres in 2010. A larger picture of the national landscape won't be available for another three years.