Selling Your Land

Somewhere in a shoebox in a good many Oklahoma houses there’s a stack of small checks, or the memory of them. A royalty check from a well nobody in the family ever saw drilled, arriving a few times a year for a few dollars, made out to a grandmother who has been gone for a while now. Or there’s no check at all, only a line on an old deed that nobody understood: reserving unto the grantor all oil, gas, and other minerals. That line is the reason so many Oklahoma landowners, when they sit down to think about selling, find themselves asking a question their neighbors in other states rarely ask. Just what is it, exactly, that we own?

There is a letter from the appraisal district that a good many Texas landowners have kept in a drawer for thirty years without reading it twice. It came the year somebody, maybe a father, maybe the owner himself, filled out the application for agricultural valuation, the one most folks call the ag exemption, and it’s the reason the tax bill on a few hundred acres of pasture has stayed modest ever since. Nobody thinks much about it while the cattle are on the grass. It comes up the day the family starts talking about selling, usually as a question somebody asks across the room: what happens to the ag?
It’s a fair question, and the answer is plainer than most people fear.

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.