Dr Sarah Taber

(It's really easy to look at this & go "Gasp! Tenant farming!" but fruit & veg crops are profitable enough to make it a decent living. What it does do is eliminate shitty legacy-only farming. You no longer have to be born into a farm family to farm. I think it's a Good Thing.)

The cash rent system means that if you do a good job farming, you come out ahead. Sometimes WAY ahead. It's fairly widely accepted as the only way to farm for a living & work your way up to ownership, if you weren't born onto one.

However. Landlords caught on that there was all this money getting made that wasn't dropping directly into their pockets. Something had to be done! Enter: the "joint venture."

The joint venture is when the landowner & farmer form a partnership. Landowner contributes the land "for free" in exchange for equity, takes idk 30-60% of the proceeds. So basically it's sharecropping except it sounds slick & kind of Silicon Valley-ey.

So now this buddy, who's been trucking along slowly building middle-class-level wealth for years through careful husbandry, now has to fend his landlord off from a "joint venture" & persuade them that cash rent is just simpler, guys, it's less paperwork, you won't like JV.

*As far as I know,* so far JV is only starting to catch on in places that already have 2 things. 1) exceptional soil/weather so it makes consistently profitable fruit & veg crops, 2) a really good ag service provider network already in place.

(Ag service providers = pick crews for hire, packing & distribution facilities, rail connections, good farm equipment repair shops, etc.) These make kind of a "sharing economy" where each farm no longer needs to buy, house, & maintain 100% of its own equipment.

Strong local ag service provider networks dramatically reduce the cost of *operating* a farm. But the net amount you can produce is still quite high (thanks to good weather/soil), & possibly higher thanks to high quality services. So land values in these farm areas go waaaay up.