That’s a question we get asked a lot when telling our friends and family about the farm. The short answer is no. We’re leasing it. This type of land tenure arrangement, basically the same as renting, can be beneficial in many situations, but is especially popular amongst young farmers like ourselves who don’t have the money to outright buy a farm. A lease arrangement allows the owners to use their land for farming without having to actually sell their family property or farm it themselves, and allows the farmers (us) access to land that would otherwise be unaffordable or unavailable.

One issue with leases as opposed to buying land is the issue of secure tenure arrangements. How do we make sure we don’t buy all kinds of equipment and invest in the land, only to have the landowners change their minds next season? The answer is long-term leases. I know farmers with leases as long as 99 years. This means they have an incentive to take good care of the soil, to implement conservation practices, and to plant perennial crops. Without this long-term lease, and without knowing if they would be on the land next season, that incentive for good stewardship would not exist.

The lease we are working on right now is a five year, renewable lease. In other words, we are secure in our land for the next five years, and at the end of that term, assuming everything is going well, we’ll sit down with the Ames family and write a new lease to extend our time. Currently we haven’t signed the lease- it is going back and forth between us and the Ames family so that each party has a chance to add things and make sure it adequately addresses all our needs and concerns. It’s a chance to think about all the things that might happen over the next five years and figure out how we might address issues as they arise. The lease process is a lot of work– reviewing legal documents, communicating, figuring out what the farmers and the landowners need– but well worth the time, since setting up a good lease is critically important to our farm.

Land for Good, a nonprofit organization focusing on land stewardship and agriculture, is facilitating our lease process. Their website has a lot of great resources about leasing and other alternative land tenure arrangements, if you’re interested in learning more.