Tag: leasing

ALEI and Hughes Center Launch Online Agricultural Conservation Lease Builder Tool

The University of Maryland’s Agriculture Law Education Initiative and the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. recently launched the Agricultural Conservation Lease Builder to aid farmers and farm landowners, throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, create agricultural leases. The Lease Builder is an online tool that guides users through questions about the farm and conservation practices to generate a customized draft lease with suggested provisions to support those practices. The tool is intended to support farmers and farm landowners to protect business interests, encourage environmental stewardship, and support on-farm conservation practices. 

The Lease Builder asks for information such as landowner and tenant information, property information, the length of the lease, activities the farmer may practice, and the farm’s conservation plan. The tool is free to use, and the entire process should take users less than an hour to complete. After building a draft lease, parties are strongly encouraged to seek individual legal advice prior to execution. 

According to Sarah Everhart, Senior Legal Specialist, Agriculture Law Education Initiative, “our hope is that new tool will help both farmers and farm landowners put their handshake agreement into a simple lease document. By referencing specific on-farm conservation practices in the lease, leasing parties can set clear expectations about stewardship and reduce the potential for legal conflict.” 

In addition to the Lease Builder tool, the site also valuable resources related to on-farm conservation, including information about common conservation practices, cost-share programs, and conservation planning. The Agricultural Conservation Lease Builder was funded by the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment. The tool can be accessed at agleasebuilder.org. Anyone with questions about the Agricultural Conservation Lease Builder may contact Sarah Everhart at severhart@law.umaryland.edu. 

Agricultural Conservation Leasing

Sarah Everhart, Legal Specialist
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Last winter, agricultural service providers, such as Extension agents and staff from Soil Conservation Districts and NRCS, attended statewide Agricultural Conservation Leasing workshops co-hosted by Sarah Everhart, Agricultural Law Education Initiative (ALEI), University of Maryland Carey Law School and the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology, Inc. (Hughes Center). The workshops highlighted the importance of using a simple farm lease to support the implementation of best management practices on leased farmlands.

Conservation practices tend to be less common on leased acres for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, instability in the leasing relationship, poor communication between landowners and farmers, and a lack of knowledge of practices and funding opportunities. In an effort to address these factors, the ALEI and the Hughes Center created the Agricultural Conservation Leasing Guide. The Leasing Guide is a great tool for both landowners and farmers. The first step in this process for most leasing parties is to contemplate and communicate their goals for the farming operation. The Leasing Guide contains communication strategies and tools to help parties take these vital first steps. For landowners who are unfamiliar with agriculture and/or on-farm conservation practices, the Leasing Guide contains an explanation of how the structure and term of a lease can impact conservation and descriptions of commonly used conservation practices. There are also considerations and sample lease language for conservation practices, useful for both landowners and farmers, within the Leasing Guide.

According to Everhart, “we tried to make it as easy as possible for folks to use a lease to both protect themselves and support the use of best management practices on the farm.  We heard from many farmers that maintenance of these practices can be an unwelcomed and often uncompensated addition to a farmer’s workload, so we included numerous ways to use lease language to equitably allocate responsibilities related to these practices.”

“We have been really pleased with number of farmers and landowners who have benefited from the Agricultural Conservation Leasing Project thus far. At this point, we estimate that, due to the Project, 45 farmers have incorporated conservation practices on leased farmland and we anticipate more to do so in the future”, said Nancy Nunn, Assistant Director, Hughes Center.

The ALEI and the Hughes Center are available to offer technical support and educational resources (leasing resources are available for download on the Hughes Center website (go.umd.edu/conservationleasing).  Anyone with questions about this project can contact Sarah Everhart, (410) 458-2475, severhart@law.umaryland.edu. The Project is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program under subaward number ENE18-151.