When I was shopping for land to eventually buy, I treated existing agricultural lease history as a minor checkbox. I figured if the lease was expired or month-to-month, I was fine. I was wrong, and it cost someone else I know dearly when a prior tenant claimed tenant-farmer protections that stalled a closing for months.
North Carolina has real protections for agricultural tenants, and verbal year-to-year leases can create holdover rights that don't show up anywhere in your title search. Nobody warned me to ask for written documentation of every farming arrangement on a parcel going back at least three years — not the realtor, not the closing attorney.
Now I request signed lease agreements or written termination notices as a condition of any offer. If the seller can't produce them, I treat it like a title defect. Because in practice, it is one.
Sellers often don't even realize what they've created by handshaking a neighbor into their fields for a few seasons.
Has anyone else run into tenant-farmer holdover complications in their state, or is this a regional quirk of the Southeast?