(800) 853-2651
SHOP NOW

Workable Acres Claimed vs. Actual

N

newfarmer9

Member
A local farm has come up for rent through an "absent" land owner who had the farm left to him but lives 2-3 hours away. The owner told me there is 140 acres workable. After walking the farm boundaries/tree lines with my GPS I am only getting 115 workable (GPS is accurate within an acre or so).

I divided his asking price by 140 acres to find his price per acre, then multiplied that by 115 and offered him that number. So basically giving him his asking price per acre but figuring on 115 acres not 140. I even offered to clean up all the fence and tree lines and run some tile as part of the deal. He turned me down even after I showed him the GPS survey, as he is sure there is 140 workable because that's what his dad told him before he passed away.

How would you approach this situation, and is there any third party way to verify workable land? Normally I would just let it go but land here is impossible to find and I haven't seen any come up for rent in the last 5 years.
 
If it was here in KY I would go to the local soil conservation office (ASCS)and have them check the official maps. We have used them in situations like this before and found them to be pretty accurate. Just my opinion and your mileage may vary.
 
If the total rent dollars is something you can work with, knowing you're renting 115 acres, go ahead. You'll never convince him Daddy was wrong, he's 150 miles away, probably doesn't know squat about farming today. Sounds like some guys I know that have never let the facts interfere with a good opinion. Keep his shortcomings in mind, schmooze him a bit, and you could be fine. But I'd still be a bit cautious because he wasn't willing to listen to fact, get it in writing to be safe.
 
Go to the "acme planimeter" site. Plot it and print it.
Will he go to FSA office with you / Yhey may have what you need.
 
Another way is to have your crop insurance (future) guy map it. They all hqave ATV mounted GPS units to map acreage.
 
Google Planimeter is also an on line tool for figuring area using google earth maps. It is quite accurate. It is the land owner's right to charge any rate he wishes. If
you can live with the rate, good. If not, move on and let someone else go for it.
 
I would be on the losing end if I paid the total asking price but only got 115 acres. At 140 acres the price per acre is on the high end, so at only 115 it's even worse. I have used planimeter on clear fields with straight edges (can only plot a straight line with planimeter) but unfortunately the farm has lots of small bush plots with curving boundaries spread throughout.

There is no FSA office or similar around here. I don't believe the county has records and if they did they likely aren't accurate. Lots of land has been cleared in the last 5-10 years.

I wonder if there is a company out there with better software than planimeter that could plot/survey the farm through satellite imagery and come up with a fairly accurate estimate?
 
I would be SHOCKED if there wasn't an FSA office around. as far as acres go; it has no bearing on what he wants for rent. Figure out your top dollar and bid it. you'll get beat out anyway. If it were me; i'd rent the ground and then bring up the acerage difference the second year, after you've convinced him you can farm. new farmers have a really hard time renting ground.
 
I am in Canada (Ontario), we have no such thing as FSA. I believe there used to be government ag reps (before my time) but they have been gone for the most part for decades (due to government cuts to ag funding). There is very little support for ag here, the governing parties know all they have to do to win the vote is appeal to urban voters in our largest city, and as a result what the city says is law and ag takes a back seat.
 
I bid my top dollar for the actual workable acres, he turned it down. I just saw the farm advertised in the local classifieds and the ad has been up more than a week, rare for this area. Everyone else must have had the same problem I did. I guess it will be a wait and see if he takes my offer, or lets a third party measure acres, or finds someone to pay his price. I don't think he is unreasonable per acre on what he THINKS is there, if there were 140 acres workable I would have paid his asking price.
 
Do not split hairs over a few acres. You are talking about 25 acres. I loose that much to deer every year. The only thing that matters is that you report accurately for crop insurance. If you reported 140 acres, and they only find 115 acres, you loose out, big time.

Don't install tile until you farm it first. You can loose a lot of money in a hurry laying tile on someone else's farm. That alone should make up the difference in money from the 25 acre discrepancy.

Where are you located? what crops will you be growing? Did you soil test the farm? That is more important than acreage, as poor ground doesn't produce. You could loose 25 acres worth of yield on poor ground vs. good ground, and without soil samples, you can't calculate input costs. without input costs, how will you know whether the ground is profitable?

google daft logic google area calculator for pinpoint accurate mapping.
 
Don't beat yourself up.

Leasing land at a loss is NOT a smart thing to do. Leasing at barely breakeven isn't bright either. You did your best. If he did not take it, oh well. There WILL be other opportunities, and they will look
better in comparison. You want to lease from someone who wants you, as well as your offer. He only wanted an offer, and there is no money or glory in renting from a Scrooge.
 
How the owner is to work with on this will tell you a lot about how he will be as a landlord in the future...
 
Have you tried the WebSoilSurvey. Not the most accurate tool but it is a tool. I find it to be around 90% accurate for the fields I use in comparison to the FSA measurements and the Agronomists measurements.
 
I am an experienced farmer, so I'm not new to this game. I always walk farms, soil test, and work out my input costs and estimated revenue per acre based on 10 year rolling average yields and prices for the area. I would never fully tile someone else farm but if I can get a 5-10 year lease on it I would run some random drainage through the wet spots. I have my own equipment to do so.

25 acres might not seem like much but when we are talking $250-$350 cash rent per acre here for decent tiled ground (even more for organic land) in South Western Ontario, 25 acres on a farm that size can be the difference between making a little money and losing a lot of money.
 
I will maybe have to see if he will sit down with me at the computer and map out the farm with planimeter. If we take some time we can do the whole farm and then map around the bush plots one by one and subtract them out. Won't be 100% accurate due to curving bush lines but will be close.

I don't have a problem letting land go if it is at breakeven or below, was just wondering if there was a good third party way to map actual acreage. I know when farms sell there always seems to be a few acres discrepancy between advertised and actual acreage. Doesn't sound like a big deal but at $15,000 plus per acre a few acres makes a big difference.
 
Had the same situation come up a couple years
ago. I even printed off gis maps and showed the
guy. Offered x amount per acres of what I had
mapped. I had 40ish, he said and wanted paid for
50. Said he'd get back to me. Never did. No harm
done. Would've liked to get it, but not going to
over pay.
 
(quoted from post at 21:38:00 12/14/15), was just wondering if there was a good third party way to map actual acreage.
Click to expand...

like this one?

Didn't mean to sound harsh before. I don't have all the facts of this deal, but, it doesn't sound like it is worth it if he wants you to pay $350 per acre for ground that makes $2.50-3.00 per bushel corn.
 
I haven't used it in a while (and have taken it off my
iPhone) but there is an app for figuring acres. You
turn it on and walk/drive the perimeter back to the
starting point. It then figures your acres. Does
anyone farm on shares there? That's how the
majority of mine is.
 
We are in an area that on good tiled ground we would get 50 or more bushels beans and 175 or more bushels corn on average. A lot of corn fields this year went 250. We are at $11.45 beans and $4.64 corn today on the local cash market.

Taking all into consideration this land wouldn't be top end land but not bottom end either. If I look at the total asking price and divide by claimed and actual acreage there is about $54/acre difference (if there is only 115 there the land is $54 per acre more expensive than if there is 140 acres). $54x115 acres = $6,210 per year x 5 year lease = $31,050. You can see why I want to get this right lol
 
Your not going to make every deal work and many deals should not even be attempted. As described this guy is not willing to even consider that something other that what he was told X number of years ago could be true, offering additional perks to someone to try and get them to be fair is not a good way to begin, or conduct, a business relationship.
 
(quoted from post at 02:27:19 12/15/15) Have you tried the WebSoilSurvey. Not the most accurate tool but it is a tool. I find it to be around 90% accurate for the fields I use in comparison to the FSA measurements and the Agronomists measurements.
Click to expand...
WebSoilSurvey is the cat's meow. Can measure any shape of field and if your nosey you can roughly find out what size shed your neighbor has :)
 
(quoted from post at 23:57:26 12/14/15) Unfortunately I'm in Canada so WebSoilSurvey is of no use.
Click to expand...
ll that per acre stuff is in only your head! The man asked x$ for whatever land there is there. Do you want it at that price or not? Simple!! Go off & do all your per acre calculating/finagling you want in private & if it doesn't pencil out to suit you, make a counter offer & if a deal isn't to be made, then move on.
 
newfarmer9: Are you wanting to be a farmer as business or a hobby???? It makes a difference. If it is going to be a money making business then you have answered your own question. You have measured the acres to the best of your abilities by walking the boundaries with the GPS unit. I am willing to bet that your 115 acres is closer to what is there than his Father's number. I found that most older farmers "grew" their land. They often went by what was on the deed. Thus not taking in to account that if there is any roads the deeds read to the middle of or creeks an old fence rows that take more ground than they "guess" it does. The same goes with yields they grow too around the coffee shop. LOL

So you have what you think is the acres and you figured out what he was asking per acre. I would not have even went that far. I would have taken the 115 acres and offered what I felt I could give and still make reasonable profit with today's market prices. That would be the offer. If you want to haggle some then fine but not 18% more than your true cost/profit price.

That is what I do since farming is a business to me not a hobby. If you want to farm as a hobby then pay whatever you want and know your going to lose money every single year you farm that land unless prices skyrocket again or you have record yields. Does it matter if land is tough to rent??? NO!!! Renting land for more than you can make a profit on is foolish. THERE have been a lot of FOOLS out there the last few years. These lower prices will soon sort them out. They will only be able to lose money for so long and then they will be broke. There will be land changing hands in the next several years. So just be ready with a good business plan and then step into a farm/rental that is good for you.

We did not pay any of the $500 per acre rents here. We also did not mine the fertility out of any of the ground we rent either. So we will be around to farm another day. Farming is along term business. It takes TIME to build it up to a working enterprise. So unless you are born into a large farm or marry into one there is only a few tried and true ways to grow. 1) Do a good job on what you do have. 2) Treat yourself and your landlords fairly. If your do this you will grow and gain ground. Acres is just a number. I always want to make the profit be worth the trouble/risk/labor it takes. IF it is not then I can and will do something else.
 
I have a small acreage I rent out. It has an easement road running the length on one side taking up about an acre. I include that acre into the total acres I am renting. I had to pay for that
acre and pay taxes on it so I figure I need the payment off it just like the rest that is farmed. The renter just adds that one acre into his total payment as a cost of doing business. I know of
others that rent out 160 acres as a 1/4 section even though there is a road and right of way in that 160. Same train of thought, they paid for it and pay taxes on it all, not just the farmable
acres. All a cost of doing business.
 
Oh, then using the actual acres from the FArm Service Agency office won't help you either, here in the a States nearly all farm land is mapped
out to the tenth of an acre by FSA.

Paul
 
There are many different ways you can verify the actual acreage, but the problem is not in the measurement, the problem is the landowner. He's simply not going to accept that he has less than 140 acres to lease. Personally, I don't see the point of trying to satisfy this guy for 115 acres, and this is just a foreshadowing of how he will be to work with.

To what do you ascribe the discrepancy? Are there right of ways for roads? Are there trees, rocks, etc. that make some of the land untillable? Or perhaps are the boundaries wrong because someone put a fence or other marker in the wrong place? If he's missing twenty acres because the fence is in the wrong place, that opens up a whole can of worms.

Here's a couple of suggestions. You should be able to go to the local courthouse (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) and pull up the actual deed. This should give the precise legal description, and from that you should be able to calculate what the acreage is per the deed. Of course just because he has a deed to 140 acres doesn't mean that's how big his land is. But it will give you a starting point. The deed should also state if there are easements that would deduct from the acreage. You should be able to deduct all the easements and other unusable area and come up with a number that's close to what your GPS says. Of course, just because you corroborate your GPS measurement doesn't mean he will accept that number.

Another approach would be to sign a lease at his given $/acre, with the provision that you and the landowner will split the cost of a survey and that the total rent will be based on the survey. Of course you need to be explicit that unusable acreage will be deducted from the surveyed acres.
 
Google DaftLogic.com. It is Google maps and you can click on the boundaries of an area. It gives you an acreage of the area you have mapped out. I used it to figure out how much land I wanted to tile and it was within an acre of the GPS. I am in Ontario.
 
(quoted from post at 16:52:29 12/14/15) I would be on the losing end if I paid the total asking price but only got 115 acres. At 140 acres the price per acre is on the high end, so at only 115 it's even worse. I have used planimeter on clear fields with straight edges (can only plot a straight line with planimeter) but unfortunately the farm has lots of small bush plots with curving boundaries spread throughout.

There is no FSA office or similar around here. I don't believe the county has records and if they did they likely aren't accurate. Lots of land has been cleared in the last 5-10 years.

I wonder if there is a company out there with better software than planimeter that could plot/survey the farm through satellite imagery and come up with a fairly accurate estimate?
Click to expand...

Where are you located? Every county in the USA is under the control of an FSA office. It may not be physically located in your county, around here some offices control 2-3 counties.

If there is farmable land in your county, then it is on file at the FSA office.

They will have a Farm # for it, a tract # and the FSA-578 will show the number of acrers of "Farmland" and will have a figure for "Cropland"

I guarantee it unless you are not in the US.

I worked crop insurance since 1980 and we always verified the acres and share using the FSA-578 form (Acrerage report) Now they even want pasture and rangeland reported.

They can also give you some nifty color photographs with the acres and a field # of every little field, even .3 or .4 of an acre.

Gene
 
>Where are you located? Every county in the USA is under the control of an FSA office.

He said he's in Ontario at least three times. Ontario is not yet part of the US.
 

If you see the ad continuing to run try going back to him. He may be interested in the offer after finding that it is in line, but just not enough to swallow his pride and call you.
 
I just used to ACME Planimeter to map all of my fields, and it came out to 10 acres less then what the FSA claims.
 
Update: I called the landowner this morning and he agreed to sit down this afternoon with the laptop and map out the farm with planimeter. We started with the whole farm (200 square acres) subtracted the main bush area (approximately 60 acres to get us down to the 140 that he thought was workable) and then subtracted all the other small bush plots, pond, etc. We ended up right around the 115 acres that I had originally surveyed.

The owner now understands there is not 140 workable. He agreed to discount the asking price some but it's still not at a level where I would be comfortable based on the actual workable acres. I farm for business not hobby so need to make sure I have the best chance possible to be in the black. I reiterated my promise to clean up fence lines, run some random tile, soil test, etc. but he doesn't seem to see the value in these services. So I left my written offer with him and that's the best I can do, we will have to see what happens.

I know to some of you this sounds like a lot of work and back and forth with the owner, but with land availability where it's at these days I need to make deals work. This is the first farm I have had a decent shot at in 5 years. I think throwing a number at a landowner and walking away if he doesn't accept is a poor way of doing business. I like to sit down with owners and show them why my offer is lower than asking. Then regardless of whether or not my offer is accepted the owner will understand why I offered what I did, instead of him thinking I was just trying to lowball.
 
Any of the fields fairly rectangular or square? Easy to measure.

Length X width in feet = square feet.

Divide by 43, 560 and you will have acres.

Gene
 
(quoted from post at 19:09:15 12/15/15) Any of the fields fairly rectangular or square? Easy to measure.

Length X width in feet = square feet.

Divide by 43, 560 and you will have acres.

Gene
Click to expand...

Gene, get with the program,LOL. google planimeter.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

C
Boundry Problem
Replies
9
Views
1K
Fixingfarmer
Fixingfarmer
C
Rent for tillage field land
Replies
16
Views
2K
caterpillar guy
C
I
big farmers small fields
2
Replies
22
Views
2K
T in NE
T in NE
Ultradog MN
Got a haircut
2 3
Replies
44
Views
3K
DoubleO7
DoubleO7
M
1952 8N New Member
Replies
10
Views
1K
Abbby
A
Tractor Parts Tractor Manuals

We sell tractor parts! We have the parts you need to repair your tractor - the right parts. Our low prices and years of research make us your best choice when you need parts. Shop Online Today.

Copyright © 1997-2024 Yesterday's Tractor Co.

All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this website, including design and content, without written permission is strictly prohibited. Trade Marks and Trade Names contained and used in this Website are those of others, and are used in this Website in a descriptive sense to refer to the products of others. Use of this Web site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy TRADEMARK DISCLAIMER: Tradenames and Trademarks referred to within Yesterday's Tractor Co. products and within the Yesterday's Tractor Co. websites are the property of their respective trademark holders. None of these trademark holders are affiliated with Yesterday's Tractor Co., our products, or our website nor are we sponsored by them. John Deere and its logos are the registered trademarks of the John Deere Corporation. Agco, Agco Allis, White, Massey Ferguson and their logos are the registered trademarks of AGCO Corporation. Case, Case-IH, Farmall, International Harvester, New Holland and their logos are registered trademarks of CNH Global N.V.

Yesterday's Tractors - Antique Tractor Headquarters
Website Accessibility Policy

Back
Top