Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

While I don’t think I have ever blogged about it, or if I did it was only in passing, I have often talked with people about the tenuousness of farming on leased land. Yesterday, I was hit square in the face with that very tenuousness.

Ironically, while my neighbor was helping me get a group of pigs back into their paddock after a quick jaunt around the neighborhood, he dropped a bomb out of nowhere:

“By the way, we leased half the farm to dairy farmers that are going to plant corn on it.”

Much of that land was very much in my own crop plan for this season. The problem is that because of our good relationship, I have a very vague lease arrangement with my neighbor, and because I had never dreamed that they might lease it to someone else, I hadn’t yet told them my plans to utilize that part of the farm. So, they of course didn’t do anything wrong by leasing it to someone else; they just assumed, unfortunately wrongly, that I wouldn’t be using the land.

Because I was stressed out about the pigs, I didn’t really respond to my neighbor at the time, but this morning I went over there to talk to him and his wife about it. Luckily, I was able to negotiate that land (back) into my own lease, very narrowly averting a disaster for the present, but more importantly, future of the farm.

My neighbors are wonderful people, and were in fact apologetic for leasing their own land, which as far as they knew I wasn’t using, to someone else.

In the end, this encounter with the tenuousness that always has me on edge about farming leased land ended well, but it scared the crap out of me and had me pouring over the real estate listings this morning…