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.
