Fixed cash leases make up 70 percent of all farmland rental contracts

In the contiguous 48 States, about 354 million acres (or 39 percent) of U.S. farmland were rented in 2014. Eighty percent of that rented land was owned by non-operator landlords who are not actively engaged in a farm operation, while the remainder was rented from one farm operator to another. Farmland may be rented out under a fixed rental rate per acre (fixed cash), a rate that depends on post-harvest crop prices or yields (flexible cash), or an agreement where the landlord receives a portion of produced output (share). A landlord may also let a tenant use the land for free. In 2014, approximately 70 percent of leases used a fixed cash rent payment. Share-based agreements were the second most common contract type, used in 17 percent of leases. Both flexible cash and free agreements accounted for less than 10 percent of agreements. Fixed cash made up the majority of agreements across different U.S. regions and landlord subtypes, such as individual and corporate ownership entities. This illustrates the broad shift from share to cash agreements in recent years: in 1999, 57 percent of leases used a fixed cash agreement and 21 percent a share agreement. A version of this chart appeared in the ERS report U.S. Farmland Ownership, Tenure, and Transfer, released on August 25, 2016.

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