The Country Life Commission appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 was tasked with studying the status of U.S. agriculture and to determine if farmers and others in rural America were being ‘left behind’ the rest of U.S. society. One of the factors that drove Mr. Roosevelt into seeking such a study was that the share of farms rented rather than owned by farmers had jumped from 25.5 percent in 1888 to more than 35 percent by the time the Commission was launched.
Since that time, no federal or state policy or program has been effective in slowing this trend, and today, about 41 percent of all U.S. farmland is rented. The share of rented land is higher in the cropland category, perhaps as high as 50 percent, with the share of rented land much lower on private pasture and rangeland. Much of the land currently being grazed by cattle and other ruminant animals is owned by federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and USDA’s Forest Service (FS) and leased by ranchers, mainly in the western United States.
Within the Midwest, most of the rented farmland is owned by non-operator landlords (NOL’s), or as they are commonly called in the popular press, absentee landlords. It is believed that Illinois has the highest share of rented farmland among U.S. states, reported at about 60 percent in the 2017 Census of Agriculture.
The significant share of farmland owned by non-operators in the United States has many implications for the social and economic fabric of the U.S. agricultural sector and rural areas, but in this blog I will focus on how it may have affected the rate of adoption of conserving agricultural practices by U.S. farmers, and the ability of U.S. agriculture to play a proactive role in combating the effects of climate change.
Overall, the 2017 Census of Agriculture reports that with respect to common in-field conservation practices, more than 200 million acres were farmed using either no-till or reduced tillage practices, accounting for more than 62 percent of total harvested cropland acres reported in that year. Adoption of cover cropping practices was far less common in 2017, with 15.4 million acres of cover-cropped farmland reported, or about 2.5 percent of total cropland, although that level did represent a 50 percent increase over the level reported in the 2012 Census of Agriculture. The latter Census figure excludes cover cropping used as a practice on land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
In the last several years, a number of studies have been conducted that looked at factors which may hinder the adoption of conservation practices on rented farmland. These include separate work commissioned by the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and American Farmland Trust (AFT), and involved surveys of NOL’s in key agricultural states. The work by TNC and several Purdue University faculty members, published in Land Use Policy in 2019 queried NOL’s, farm operators, and farm managers in three Midwest states, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. Among the factors identified in this study that serve as a barrier to adoption are the typical short length of lease contracts (annual renewals are common), high and/or competitive rental rates in the region, lack of awareness on the part of NOL’s on the availability of financial and/or technical assistance from USDA conservation programs and other organizations, lack of awareness by the NOL on the agronomic characteristics of their farmland and the negative impacts that certain farming practices can create for downstream interests, and risk aversion, an attitude which is especially common among older NOL’s. The average age of NOL’s in the survey was 69 years, 10 years older than the average farm operator in the survey.
With respect to the AFT-commissioned study, they conducted a survey of NOL’s in 13 states, with a sample size of 3,958 respondents. As with the TNC study, the respondents were older on average, ranging from 65 years old in New York state to 73 years old in Iowa. The majority of NOL’s surveyed rented their land to family members or friends of the family, primarily under verbal agreements rather than written contracts. Their responses indicated relatively little knowledge about available assistance or information on conservation from government agencies, especially local soil and water conservation districts. At the time of the survey, only a fraction of them had their farmland enrolled in one of the USDA cost share programs like EQIP or CSP, ranging from only six percent in North Carolina up to 29 percent in Iowa.
Both studies indicate that there is often poor communications between tenants and landlords, with the farmer assuming their landlord would not want to adopt conservation without asking them, and many landlords expressing reluctance to press their tenant on these matters. According to a series of workshops convened by TNC in three states in 2018, while most NOL’s value conservation and soil health, they seem satisfied with the level of conservation already in place.
These organizations and others have developed soil health information toolkits and model cropland lease documents to help facilitate communications between farmers and landowners about increasing the level of conservation on farmland. The TNC also has identified areas in federal tax policy that have implications for this issue. They include:
• Tax treatment and deductibility of cover cropping expenses
• Use of crop share rather than cash leases allow landlords to benefit from payments under USDA conservation programs
• Use of trusts or corporations to manage farmland leases may fragment ownership in future generations, making it even more difficult for farmers to gain consent for adoption of conservation practices on rented farmland.
