Air January 24, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. Well, you missed a great meeting in Clay Center last week. Excellent presentations on beef cattle, marketing, and processing. I’ll be bringing you bits and pieces of that over the next couple of weeks, but for right now we have a much more time sensitive issue to discuss - Oral farm leases.

Kansas law is very specific about oral leases on cultivated farm ground. They are legal, unfortunately in my opinion, and they are binding. They are considered annual leases that renew automatically unless proper notice is given. What constitutes proper notice of termination? Three things - it must be in writing, it must be given 30 days prior to March 1st, and it must fix the termination date of the tenancy to be March 1 except on that land planted to a fall seeded grain crop. For those acres, the termination date of the tenancy is the day following the last day of harvest or August 1st, whichever comes first. We are rapidly approaching that 30 days prior to March 1st, it’s next Tuesday in fact. By a week from now, if you wanted to get rid of a tenant and you had not served notice, you are stuck with them for another year at least. Oh, you could still serve notice, but it would not be effective until March 1, 2002 and they could plant the whole farm to wheat in October of 2001 and be allowed to harvest it. Timing is critical! If you also have a written lease that does not set a termination date, these rules apply there as well. Now, a 1953 Kansas Supreme Court decision also stated that oral pasture leases are different than oral cultivated land leases. Pasture leases are for a set period of time, not a whole year, and as such they were not bound by the same notice of termination requirements. Technically, you could tell someone who has leased your pastures for the past 30 years that they weren’t getting it this year and you could do that the day before they were going to turn cattle into them. I would hope that wouldn’t happen and that you would give several months notice, but it just points out how many potential problems can be fixed with a written lease. We have lease forms, we have sample leases, we have bulletins explaining the Kansas farm lease law. All you have to do is stop by the Extension Office and pick them up.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2001.

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