Farmland Title Research: 7 Checks Attorneys Should Run

Farmland looks like the simplest thing an attorney can be handed. One seller, one large parcel, no subdivision, no association, nothing built. In practice these files carry more separate encumbrance categories than a comparable commercial deal, because agricultural land accumulates districts, leases, program obligations, and severed interests over a century of continuous use, and almost none of it is visible from the road.

The other structural difference is that several of the important items are not in the recorder’s office at all. Knowing which office holds which record is most of the work here.

What makes these parcels different

Three things.

The descriptions are older and coarser. Aliquot parts, government lots, and metes and bounds tied to fence lines and creeks, frequently carried forward by reference for a hundred years.

The land is almost always in use by somebody. Crop leases, grazing, and hunting arrangements exist on most productive ground, and many are unrecorded and oral.

The estate has usually been divided vertically. Minerals, and sometimes water, were severed generations ago while the surface kept changing hands.

The 7 checks we run

1. Reconcile the description against the tax parcels and the acreage

Acreage recitals on farm deeds are frequently approximate and occasionally wrong by a material margin, and the price is usually per acre. Compare the recorded description to the assessor’s parcels and count the tracts, the discipline set out in our guide to legal description defects.

2. Search for a severed mineral estate

Assume it happened until the record shows otherwise. A reservation in a 1940s deed to the whole section survives every later conveyance of the surface, and it can bring surface entry rights with it. The sequence is in our guide to severed mineral interests.

3. Find the leases, recorded and otherwise

Look for recorded leases and memoranda, then ask the seller directly about unrecorded ones. This matters more than usual because several states set statutory termination dates and notice requirements for farm tenancies, and a buyer who closes after that date may hold land somebody else has the right to farm for a season. What the record shows is only half the answer.

4. Distinguish recorded conservation easements from program contracts

A conservation easement is a recorded instrument that runs with the land and belongs in the report. A federal or state program enrollment is a contract with an agency, generally not recorded, with its own term and its own consequences for early termination. Both bind a buyer’s use in practice and only one is findable in a title search.

5. Check the districts

Drainage, levee, irrigation, and soil conservation districts can levy assessments against the land, and their charges are frequently collected with the property taxes rather than recorded as separate instruments. The mechanics resemble our note on PACE and special assessment liens, and the office to call is the district or the treasurer.

6. Run the agricultural and UCC filings

Crops, livestock, equipment, and stored grain are personal property, secured through filings that live in a state office rather than the county land records. Some states also maintain agricultural lien registries specific to landlords, suppliers, or processors. A land search alone does not reach any of it.

7. Confirm access, fencing, and section line rights

Confirm legal access rather than assuming the lane off the county road is a right. Check for recorded fence line or boundary agreements, and in states where section line rights of way exist by statute, understand that the road may exist as a matter of law with nothing recorded. Where access is disputed, the analysis is in our note on easement and boundary disputes.

Where these files go wrong

Three patterns recur.

• Pricing on a recited acreage. The recital is not the conveyance. On a per-acre deal the difference between 158 and 147 acres is the whole negotiation, and only a survey settles it.
• A tenant nobody asked about. The buyer plans to farm it next season and learns in February that the notice date passed in September. This is the single most common surprise on these files.
• Treating minerals as theoretical. A severed mineral estate with entry rights can put equipment on cropland. It is a use question, not just a royalty question.

What the record will not settle

A search reports what was recorded and indexed in that county over the period searched, with copies. It will not locate a boundary or verify acreage, which require a survey. It cannot see an unrecorded farm lease, a program contract with an agency, a district’s assessment balance, or personal property filings in a state office. An empty result reflects the record rather than proving the land is unencumbered, and on agricultural ground the unrecorded layer is unusually thick.

Order the record, then work the other offices

AFX Research performs in-person searches, certified abstracts, and full document copies from any U.S. county — delivered in 12–72 hours and backed by our search guarantee. Rural counties are exactly where in-person capability matters, because the older indexes are the least likely to be online.

Order a title search on the parcels, or compare our search products if the file needs the full chain rather than a current-owner report.