I used to think that if a seller disclosed a lease, the important work was done. Then I leased my own five acres and realized how much gets left out — not out of malice, necessarily, but because landowners often don't track what tenants actually do to the soil.
When I was researching a potential purchase last fall, I went directly to the previous tenant farmer instead of relying on the seller's disclosures. That conversation was worth more than every document I'd received. He told me about three consecutive years of heavy corn on the same ground with zero cover cropping. The soil test the seller provided looked passable, but compaction and biological depletion don't show up on a basic NPK panel.
I've been wondering why nobody talks about interviewing former tenants as a standard step before closing. It costs nothing. They usually have no reason to protect the seller's interests.
Has anyone else gotten more truth from a former tenant than from the actual transaction paperwork — or does this approach fall apart in your region for reasons I'm not seeing?