6 Farm Lease Clauses That Outlive a North Dakota Handshake

Think a handshake is all it takes to seal a North Dakota farm lease?

It isn’t.

Cash rent is real money here, up about 2% statewide in 2026, per North Dakota State University Extension’s analysis of the state’s cropland rent survey, and a handshake settles none of what happens when a season goes wrong.

These are the farm lease clauses that outlive a handshake.

Note: This is general information, not legal advice. Farm lease terms and requirements are subject to change, so confirm your situation with the North Dakota Mediation Service, run by the North Dakota Department of Agriculture.

1. A Lease Longer Than a Year

Three years, five years, ten years: A farm lease promising any of them only holds up if somebody signed it.

Say the terms out loud instead, and the deal turns void the moment it runs past a single crop year.

The crop year is the only clock that matters.

That’s North Dakota’s statute of frauds, and it doesn’t care how sincere the handshake was.

An oral farm lease longer than one year is unenforceable anywhere in the state.

A written, signed lease skips that trap, and it can run up to ten years on North Dakota farmland before the law caps it again.

Ten years of certainty beats a fresh conversation every March.

That’s what a signature buys.

2. Landlord’s Share of the Crop

A farm landlord’s cut of the harvest doesn’t exist automatically.

State law hands the entire crop to the tenant unless the two sides agreed on a split.

The tenant walks away with all of it.

An oral promise to split a third to the landlord and two-thirds to the tenant can still count as an agreement.

It only works if the tenant admits, in court, that the conversation happened.

Deny it instead, and the law doesn’t call the split unproven.

The law treats the agreement as if it had never existed.

The tenant’s default entitlement covers the whole crop again.

Proof is everything.

North Dakota State University (NDSU) Extension’s Bryon Parman crunched the state’s county-level rent-survey numbers and found cropland rents rose 2% statewide in 2026.

A written, signed split doesn’t depend on anyone’s memory or admission.

It holds on its own, whatever the tenant says later.

3. A Landlord’s Claim Filed by July 1

A landlord can reserve title to their share of the crop until the tenant meets the lease’s conditions.

That reservation only protects a landlord against somebody else with a claim on the same grain, a bank, a grain elevator, or another creditor of the tenant.

It also depends on timing.

The landlord has to file the lease with the county recorder, or with the state’s central notice system, before July 1 of the year the crop grows.

Miss that date, and state law calls the landlord’s claim waived against anyone who already bought or lent against the crop.

The claim doesn’t survive at all.

A handshake has nothing to file with a county recorder, so that protection is never available to it.

4. A Lease That Doesn't Renew Itself

A farm tenancy renews on its own the moment the landlord cashes next year's rent check.

State law automatically renews an open-ended lease on the same terms, for up to another year, if the tenant keeps farming and the landlord takes the money.

The law does that part on its own.

That automatic renewal can still trap a landlord who lined up a new tenant for next season.

Deposit this year's rent check out of habit, and state law keeps that tenant under lease for another season.

A written lease with a stated end date skips that trap.

It ends when the paper says it ends, and depositing a rent check can't extend it by accident.

That's the whole trap avoided.

5. A Term That Doesn't End With a Death

A landlord's death doesn't automatically end a farm lease.

State law only lets a death end a lease that either side could have walked away from at any time anyway.

It skips right over a fixed-term lease.

That distinction only matters because state law limits how long a handshake lease can run.

An oral farm lease can't legally stretch past one crop year.

That cap means it never becomes the kind of multi-year, fixed-term lease that death can't end.

A written lease can run five years, ten years, whatever the parties sign for, and that fixed term is exactly what a landlord's death can't touch.

Paper outlives people.

If a landlord dies partway through a signed five-year lease, that lease keeps running against the landlord's estate and, eventually, their heirs.

A handshake tenancy never faces that same test. North Dakota law never lets it run longer than the current crop year to begin with.

6. A Lease That Survives a Sale

Farmland changes hands constantly, and a lease has to survive that.

State law puts a buyer into the same remedies the seller had: The right to collect rent, to act on nonperformance, to answer for waste, to enforce forfeiture.

Only the name on the deed changes.

That protection only stretches as far as the lease's term.

A handshake lease can't legally promise more than one crop year at a time, so a sale only ever carries forward whatever's left of that single year.

A written lease locked in for five or ten years passes its full remaining term to the new owner instead.

State law never lets an oral lease run that long in the first place, so no handshake can produce that same certainty.

Paper travels. Handshakes don't.

A handshake leaves a buyer nothing beyond that single year to honor, no matter how many years the parties meant it to run.

Where a Bad Lease Ends Up

North Dakota runs a mediation program for farmers and landlords who can't agree on what a lease said.

The North Dakota Mediation Service, a program of the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, brings in a neutral third party to work through exactly this kind of dispute.

The service charges $25 an hour for mediation and credit counseling alike.

The program exists because so many North Dakota farm lease disputes never had anything in writing behind them to settle.

Nobody has proof.

A mediator sits between two different memories of the same conversation and has to guess which one holds up.