Advice on selling land with farmer

[RuthMcG]

Hi All,

Many thanks to all of you who responded and it has certainly given us food for thought. Have taken your advice and booked an appointment with our Notaire for legal advice. However, we do think at this stage that we are probably rightly stuck unless our farmer (age 40) decides to be honourable and allows us to relinquish the bail with a reasonable amount of notice.

With regards to the price of the property - we are only looking to cover our expenses on buying it and the renovations that we have done. We know that for a property this size there has been no signifcant market increase in the time we have been here.

On re-reading the Contrat de bail en Ferme it is a 2 page document which only covers the sections of land rented, what the farmer is allowed to do on the land, the rights to produce, amount of rent, registering of the bail and "cas imprevus" which doesn't really say much.

Does anyone know if the farmer has unused certain parcels for 3 years is there any way of negotiating back these parcels of land for ourselves? He has unsued about half of the land in the bail for this period of time.

The reason that we are looking into all of this is to make the property more interesting to potential buyers who may want to do something with the land themselves. It may arise that someone like ourselves, with no real farming interest, will be interested in the property for the gite business and simply put for its stunnign beauty.....

Will keep you posted and thanks again - it is really appreciated!

Ruth