This study attempts to answer the following research questions: (i) In rural Mozambique, is agricultural land a free resource? (ii) What is the role of males versus females in Mozambican peasant farming? (iii) Do indigenous property land rights induce rural Mozambique’s farm households to decide whether to undertake agricultural investments? The fundamental reason why these questions merit more research is that Mozambique is a poor country because it is a rural society and economy. As such, the answers to the above questions can help researchers and policy makers in the area of public policy understand why consumption of most people living in rural Mozambique falls below the poverty line. Such understanding, in turn, may help them define appropriate pro-poor land and gender policies. To answer the first question, I explored the role land plays in Mozambican peasant farming by investigating whether agricultural land is a free resource. To answer the second question, I explored the roles of gender within farm households by testing whether on a Mozambican peasant farm, a marginal adult man’s contribution to family output is larger, smaller or the same as an adult woman’s. I also assessed whether female farmers are technically more, less or equally efficient in agricultural production as their male counterparts. To answer the last question, I explored the hypothesis that indigenous property land rights affect rural farm households’ incentives to undertake agricultural investments. To do the first three tasks, I developed a model of land as a free input and applied it to the case of Mozambique’s farm sector. To explore the above hypothesis, I employed a framework commonly used to examine the link between land rights and households’ agricultural investment decisions, the model suggested by Besley (1995). The models estimation used farm household survey data collected in 1996-97 from rural Mozambique. The results suggest that in Mozambique, agricultural land is essentially a free resource rather than a constraint on how much people can produce, gender roles within farm households exist and affect family farm output negatively, and that, with few exceptions, indigenous land rights matter for investment in agriculture.