Liming a rented field when the lease is about to end can hand the next tenant $12,800 of what a $19,200 lime bill earns back. Liming means spreading ground limestone to reduce soil acidity. The figures come from an example with invented numbers, worked below: 160 acres, $120 per acre, a one-year lease that is not renewed. Nebraska Extension says the cost of lime is likely to need “three or more harvests for full payback”. So write each field’s production plan at least three seasons ahead and mark the season where each lease ends. Before you spend money on a decision that pays back past that mark, settle it with the landlord.
The plan is one sheet. Each field gets a row and each season’s crop gets a column, one per planting in order; a double-crop year, such as wheat followed by soybeans, takes two columns. On a rented field, a line down the right edge of the last column the lease covers is the lease mark. A last column holds notes.
What does a lime bill cost if the lease ends first?
On many farms, each field’s crop is decided one season at a time, close to planting. On rented ground, a decision that pays back over several seasons then fails in one of two ways. Either the tenant puts it off on a field whose lease is running out, or the tenant makes it and the return goes to whoever plants the field after the lease ends. A plan with one column, for this season’s crop only, shows neither problem.
The example field has 160 acres of corn and soybeans in western Ohio, rented on a one-year lease that the landlord renews from year to year. The tenant limes before the first corn crop. Assume the extra grain earns the bill back evenly over three harvests, the low end of Nebraska’s range. The lease covers only the first harvest.
How many harvests does one liming keep paying?
Embrapa Cerrados, of Brazil’s federal farm research agency, ran a trial on a very acid field near Brasília, cleared in 1999. Plots got lime worth 4 tonnes per hectare at full neutralizing power (about 1.8 short tons per acre), worked once into the top 20 cm (8 inches). They were then farmed no-till for four seasons of soybeans and maize, with cover crops between them and sprinkler irrigation from 2001. In the paper’s yield table, the limed plots yielded more than the unlimed ones in all four crops.
| Season | Crop | No lime | Limed once, in 1999 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000/01 | Soybeans | 1,281 kg/ha (19.0 bu/acre) | 1,684 kg/ha (25.0 bu/acre) | 403 kg/ha (6.0 bu/acre) |
| 2001/02 | Maize | 1,480 kg/ha (23.6 bu/acre) | 6,871 kg/ha (109.5 bu/acre) | 5,391 kg/ha (85.9 bu/acre) |
| 2002/03 | Soybeans | 1,879 kg/ha (27.9 bu/acre) | 2,930 kg/ha (43.6 bu/acre) | 1,051 kg/ha (15.6 bu/acre) |
| 2003/04 | Maize | 5,437 kg/ha (86.6 bu/acre) | 10,419 kg/ha (166.0 bu/acre) | 4,982 kg/ha (79.4 bu/acre) |
That trial was on soil far more acid than a field that has been farmed and limed for years, so the size of the gain does not carry over to your farm. The duration can: the gain lasted through four crops. The Nebraska guide ties that duration to the farming horizon: “the profitability of lime application is influenced by how long the land will be farmed”.
The return does not always arrive evenly. In a seven-year trial at Mococa, in Brazil’s São Paulo state, with lime applied only in the first year, the authors found that the investment in lime was practically paid back in the first year. The gain did not stop there: liming at the start alone kept raising maize yield for five years, and then cotton and soybean yield. Even when the bill is earned back early, the later crops go to whoever plants the field. A separate article covers checking a field against its rotation plan, another decision whose return comes in later seasons.
How long does a lease run?
In the United States, often one year at a time. About 40 percent of farmland in the 48 contiguous US states is rented. The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) notes that “farmland lease contracts are often set for 1 year with the option to renew”. Its authors add that “the length of time a tenant has been operating a land parcel may not determine the tenant’s willingness to implement long-term practices”, because nothing guarantees the next renewal.
Michael Langemeier, of Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture, writes that the vast majority of cropland leases run for only one year, partly because oral leases are typically not valid for longer. Lime, he adds, typically lasts several years, so some of its value likely runs past the lease. An improvement often gets delayed, or never made, because landlord and tenant cannot agree on a fair sharing of the expense.
On the example field, a one-year lease puts the mark right after the first column. Every cell after the mark depends on renewing the lease, so it carries the landlord’s name beside yours until you two have talked.
Langemeier lists three ways to pay for an improvement on rented ground, lime among them. The landlord pays and charges a higher rent, the two share the cost, or the tenant pays and is compensated for the value not yet used up when the lease ends. The choice is yours and the landlord’s, and the notes column records it. What a lease must say, and what the law in your country requires, is for your lawyer. Whether owning a field would be worth its price is a separate calculation, set out in another article, on renting land or buying it.
What does a tenant do when the lease is short?
Often a tenant puts off the decisions with the longest return. In Finland, where about 40 percent of leases run five years, Sami Myyrä built an economic model of liming on leased land in his 2009 doctoral thesis, for spring barley under five-year leases. It is a calculation, not a measurement. Soil pH is the scale of acidity, and a lower number means more acid soil. In the model, liming pays a farmer sure of keeping the land whenever pH falls below 5.4. For a tenant sure the lease will not be renewed, liming at the start of the lease pays only if pH is already below 5.
A tenant who may lose the land has fewer seasons to earn back the cost, so lets the pH fall further before liming. In the model, when liming pays, the best time is right after a new lease is signed.
The Finnish case does not show that renters farm worse as a rule. The ERS analyzed survey data on five field crops from 2011 to 2021 and found little evidence of systemic differences between owner-operated and cash-rented fields in conservation tillage, cover crops and six permanent practices. One possible reason is that many tenants stay on the same field for years: in 2014, 34.7 percent of cash-rented acreage had been rented to the same tenant for more than 10 years. What differs is how long the tenant can count on the field.
Which cell of the table gets a name this week?
You decide the cells before the lease mark. The cells after it, and any decision whose return runs past it, depend on renewing the lease, so the landlord’s name goes beside yours. In 2014 USDA asked US landlords how involved they were. Cultivation decisions and one-season conservation practices were mostly made by the tenant only, while permanent conservation practices and government programs more often involved the landlord.
On a rented field, if a season comes before the lease ends, you decide its crop alone. If it comes after, you agree it with the landlord first. A cell nobody has decided yet gets three things: the word “open”, the date by which it must be decided and the name of whoever will decide it. After the mark, that date is the date to settle renewal with the landlord.
If you let a company or an institution run a trial on a strip of a field, the trial often runs for more than one season. In that field’s cells for those seasons, also write the name of whoever runs the trial. A separate article covers who may use the data from the trial strip.
The first version takes about two hours, with your field map, the record of the last two seasons and your lease agreements at hand. With one row per field, the plan also sits beside the field’s yield record, which a separate article explains how to keep season by season. Other written plans for the farm are covered in library on planning.
The cell after the lease mark is the hardest to fill, because filling it means talking to the landlord about renewal before the decision with the long return, not after it. If you have that talk a season ahead, the two of you can share a cost such as liming on terms you can both see. If you wait until harvest, all that is left to settle is who keeps a return someone has already paid for. Putting a date on that talk is part of farm management as much as choosing any crop.