Whether you’re an agricultural landlord, or a tenant, it’s worth checking that you have got your lease properly drawn up and in order.

If not, warns advocate Michael Miles, you could be heading for trouble further down the line.

Michael is a specialist in land and property disputes at Corlett Bolton. ‘Anything land-related’ is how he describes it.

He says: ‘I do disputes, draft leases – residential commercial and agricultural - I do agricultural and commercial conveyancing. Anything that involves title issues, anything complex like that, anything that requires any kind of digging or has “tricky bits” tends to land on my desk.’

And if you’re thinking of renting out some land, Michael says: ‘My advice would be to see an advocate and get it drawn up properly because not a lot of thought is given to the legal side of things: it’s often seen as a bit of a formality.

‘And certainly you get a lot of old school farmers on the island who think everything is still done by a handshake and “Oh yes that’s fine, I’ll put the fence up and you give me that field”.

‘And those things work fine when the relationship’s good, but the whole point of a lease is that it deals with things when the relationship starts being not so good. And, when problems come up, you really do want a proper lease with everything defined clearly - the rent, the period - and then there’s no dispute. Really, it’s worthwhile spending the money to make sure that’s right.’

So what are the things that generally go wrong?

Michael says: ‘You find that non payment of rent is an issue, or arguments when rent is coming up for review.

‘When the landlord decides that the farmer is not paying enough and wants more and the farmer says :“Well I barely make enough money as it is”

‘Those arguments, in particular, become quite heated and when you see agricultural tenancy disputes they can get quite tense.’

Michael adds that the only way to deal with a situation like this is ‘carefully’.

He says: ‘The usual thing to do is to get a surveyor in, to get a professional opinion on how much rent they should be paying because we’re legal experts, we’re not value experts.

‘And then we work from there and try and reach a compromise and say: “Well this is how much money [the tenant] can afford to pay - can we reach some middle ground?”

‘We often will try and get them to meet and talk it out but it depends on what history there is and how heated it’s already got: sometimes they don’t want to be anywhere near each other by that point.’

When it comes to the cost of renting angricultural land, it seems likely that tenant farmers, faced with the recent exponential rises in input costs, may be looking for some help with rent, or at least a freeze on what they are currently paying.

Michael says: ‘We did have one rent review and one of the points the tenant raised was: ‘I know I wasn’t paying much before but I’m really struggling now’. He was citing not just the increased cost of living but the massively increased cost of fertiliser and, with Ramsey Bakery shut, many farmers are saying: “Well that’s most of my business gone”.

‘That is feeding in already and these are some very big issues.

‘I’m not seeing a big uptake yet in farmers saying: “I need a hand” but I wouldn’t be surprised if they come through, if they’ve seen costs sky rocket and business drop.’

It’s not easy to get a tenant out of a farm tenancy and for good reason, as Michael explains.

He says: ‘Particularly under the old 1969 Act they were very tenant-friendly but even under the newer leases it’s not designed to be easy because, if you’ve put put crops in [landlords] can’t just say “get out in a month’s time”. Their livelihood is literally in the ground so there’s always a growing season before they can go.

‘If it’s an older tenancy agreement and it’s been passed down through the family you see children, grandchildren even, of the original tenants on the land and it’s like: “No we’ve been here forever, this is part of our livelihood, this is our home”. ‘It’s a massive upheaval if someone says: “Right, we want you off” and it can cause a lot of worry.’

However there can be a good ending to some of these situations.

Michael says: ‘We did an agricultural tenancy dispute where we managed to end it by negotiating a sale between the parties, from the landlord to the tenant. There were a lot of issues but then the tenant put an offer in and the landlord was happy so that was a different way of doing it. It worked well in the end. That was a good resolution.’