I had my neighbor over yesterday to finalize our lease agreement and to discuss my future plans. The good news is that he has agreed to lease me twenty acres of pasture land for five years with the option to add an additional fifteen acres on a five year lease next year. All together, the good news is that I have access to thirty-five acres of pasture for the next five years. At ten pigs per acre, I can raise 350 pigs. If I push the stocking rate to fifteen pigs per acre, I can raise 525 pigs. There are also about ten acres of woods in between two of those pastures that I could lease as well, although I am less interested in raising pigs in the woods than many people are. The bad news is that my neighbors are ready to move whenever a buyer comes along. Luckily, they are asking for an osbcene amount of money for the place and they are not yet budging on the price, so I don’t think a buyer is coming along any time soon.
However, such uncertainty makes it very hard to plan for the future. For example, if I knew that I would definitely be able to use the land for five or ten years, I could spend the money to install permanent fencing on the leased land. As things stand, I could invest thousands of dollars in fencing only to have my neighbors sell the land six months later to new owners that do not want to continue the lease. Similarly, with a reliable long term lease, I could invest some money in working on the drainage of a couple of the fields, but again, as things stand that money might go right out the window if my neighbors sell the place. I am, therefore, in the classic position of being unwilling to make improvements (and to benefit from those improvements) to leased land.
In addition, during the course of the conversation, there was a further more troubling reality check. I have been living in a fantasy world where the housing market collapse has brough my neighbor’s head out of the clouds in terms of how much money he and his wife would want for the agricultural land on their property (set back, non-road frontage). In this fantasy world where land values have fallen back to earth the cash flow and profit from the scaled-up farm would make it possible for me to buy 100 acres of land (about sixty in pasture, forty in woods) from my neighbors and pay it off in five years while I continued to work my day job (extending the time I work that day job by two years, to 2015). That fantasy was shattered yesterday when my neighbor threw out $4,000 per acre as the ballpark figure on the land that we discussed, about 40% of which is worthless steep wooded hillside that I have to buy to maintain the balance of woods and open fields on the remainder of my neighbor’s farm, that I could use to run my numbers to see if buying the land might be feasible. End of story. End of fantasy. Very likely the end of Stony Brook Farm at a full-time scale.
The only option remaining is to move. However, Jen and I are very happy hear. We have a beautiful house, a beautiful barn (the exterior needs sprucing up), beautiful views, what little land we have is also very nice, and we live just a few minutes from two nice villages, and while Jen is willing to entertain the idea of moving, she is not really willing to sacrifice any of those things to do so.
So, in this fantasy crushed, reality checked world, the big questions that weigh now heavily on Stony Brook Farm is, will a farm that satisfies us both come along before my neighbors sell out, and will I be able to get the farm where I want it to without being able to make the infrastructural investments that I had planned in my fantasy (a hoop house for raising pigs in the winter, for example)?
Land is the lynch pin in the resurgence of small- and mid-scale agriculture and just yesterday I was royally buggered by it.
