BOISE—Almost 31 percent of farmland in Idaho is rented and most of the landlords who rent that land out are non-farmers.
A survey conducted by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service found that 3.64 million acres of farmland in Idaho was rented out by landlords in 2014. That represented 30.8 percent of Idaho’s total 11.8 million acres of farmland last year.
Seventy percent of that rented farmland was cropland while 28 percent was pasture. Forests and other uses made up the rest.
University of Idaho Agricultural Economist Garth Taylor said the survey results show that “farmers are renting an awful lot of land. They don’t own it because it’s too expensive. The reason for that is that they are farmers, not land speculators.”
It was the first time NASS has surveyed farmland landlords since 1999. The Tenure, Ownership and Transition of Agricultural Land survey was conducted in cooperation with USDA’s Economic Research Service.
According to the survey, 3,439 of the total 17,909 farmland landlords in Idaho were farmers while the other 14,470 were non-farming entities, including partnerships, corporations, trusts and other types of ownership.
The large number of non-farming landlords didn’t surprise Sen. Jim Patrick, a Republican farmer from Twin Falls who has been contacted several times by institutional buyers seeking agricultural land.
“I know the institutional buyers are out there and they’ve bought some pretty large farms in this area,” he said.
Based on survey results, farmland landlords in Idaho expect to transfer 1.99 million acres to different owners in the next five years. Of that total, 247,546 acres are expected to be sold to non-relatives and 404,368 acres are expected to be put in trust.
Source: www.capitalpress.com