Selling Farmland With a Tenant on It: The Handshake, the Crop, and the Conversation
The man who farms your ground has probably never signed anything. Most don’t. He showed up one spring a long time ago, maybe to help your father, maybe after your father couldn’t, and the arrangement was settled the way such things were settled then: a price per acre, a handshake at the tailgate, and a check that has come every year since, about the time the harvest was in. He waves when he passes the mailbox. He fixed the water gap after the flood without being asked. And now that you’ve begun thinking about selling the land, he’s the first person you think about and the last person you want to tell.