Roughly half of all Iowa’s farmland is under contract to tenant farmers, and anyone familiar with agriculture knows that two significant dates for farmland leases are Sept. 1, the deadline for giving notice of termination, and March 1, the start date for new leases. 

Extra attention is being given to the Sept. 1 deadline this year because low crop prices are expected to prompt many tenants to seek lower rent agreements. In fact, corn and soybean prices are now 40-50 percent below their highs of just a few years ago.

With all of that legal activity, I had a couple of questions for Neil Harl, Iowa State University’s Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture Emeritus. Harl is a walking treasure trove of agriculture history and economics.

My questions were: Why Sept. 1 and March 1, and how did those dates come to be inscribed in the Iowa Code? 

I asked the second question because today’s political winds are blowing away from anything that smacks of government regulation. It seemed to me that telling farmers, who are among our nation’s most independent business owners, when they can and can’t sign leases would be akin to heresy if it were proposed today.

Harl said it doesn’t matter what political leaders think today because Iowa’s laws about farmland leasing are nearly as old as the state. He cited a reference from the Iowa Code of 1873 and said portions of farmland leasing laws probably go back even further.

To understand why those particular dates were written into the law, Harl said, it helps to know that Iowa’s rural landscape was considerably different 150 years ago.  

Before power equipment replaced horses, he said, virtually every tenant family lived on the farm they worked.

Today, producers who lease farmland live somewhere else, either on their own farms or even in town. 

Large chunks of Iowa farmland belong to absentee landowners whose connection to the land is through a parent or grandparent, or because they bought it as an investment.

During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, Harl said, March 1 was the date before spring planting when tenants could move. In fact, he said, “up through the mid-1950s there was quite a bit of moving of farm tenants.”

“My dad was a tenant farmer, and we moved twice,” Harl said, “once right after I was born we moved to a little bit bigger farm, and then three years later we moved to an even bigger, better farm.”

Both moves occurred on March 1, Harl said, because if you didn’t have a common date back then, there would have been chaos as hundreds — sometimes thousands — of tenant farmers moved each year to new locations.  

If you want to terminate a lease, the law requires that you act on or before Sept. 1. The termination deadline, Harl noted, is six months before March 1 and falls during a slack period between growing and harvest seasons, when the workload is less and farmers have time to think and plan for the coming year.

Farm tenancies as we know them, Harl said, aren’t a Midwestern or even an American invention. “They go back to old England.” 

“After William the Conqueror took over England in 1066,” Harl said, “the king set up arrangements that would support his policies with money and armies.” 

“There were different kinds of tenure, and one was called ‘socage’ tenure, which was like our modern-day crop-share lease. You got possession of the land, but you had to give up a fraction of that to the king,” he said.  

“Our crop-share leasing really started there in old England,” Harl said. “That’s partly why we call these people landlords. The king was lord of the land.”