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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] displaced farmers

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  • From: Allan Balliett <aballiett AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] displaced farmers
  • Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:24:15 -0500

This doesn't help but I don't understand how a contract can be voided unless you
weren't paying. In the future you need to read contracts very carefully.

Sorry, Robert - It has been my experience, and the experience of other farmers that I know, that land leases always boil down to 'the will of the owner.' If he's tired of having a farmer on his land, it don't matter what the lease says.

The most likely issue that will displace a farmer from leased land is the land owner's decision to use the land differently. The most devastating move is to have the land sold out from under the farmer. This happened to a friend of ours who had one of those great "100 year leases" on some, at the time, unimportant land outside of Washington DC. The land was sold to Reverand Moon's people (to turn into a fox hunt!) and the farmer was displaced. Famous last words from the Moonies "If you want to leave your greenhouses here, we can use them and we wont penalize you for failing to remove them from the property timely." (This is for real!) What blew my mind was that he left the greenhouses there for them and they did utilize them and they were immediately accepted in the local farmers markets with their greenhouse products!

The first time this happened to me (a lease that was not a lease), I went to an attorney. He essentially told me what I mentioned above: The lease is rules in a relationship, the relationship between the farmer and the landowner. The rules must be kept by the farmer or he will be removed from the land. The rules don't really go both ways. The relationship is always at the will of the land owner, not the needs of the farmer. If there is contention and it goes to court, the judge will side with the land owner every time. I asked how we could make up a lease that was infallible. He told me that the only way to have a lease that you could rely on was to buy the land. There is no other way.

I assume the commercial leases are more effective because there is more cash flow to the landowner and the land is being utilized at more or less it's maximum value.

If you've worked around the weakness of farm leases, I'd like to hear how because I'm again in a lease situation and the land was recently subdivided (on paper, 36 acres has become 3 parcels of land), so, bad economy aside, the writing is on the wall, no?

-Allan in WV




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