How to Contact Absentee Landowners About a Solar Lease

Your land agent pulls into the yard of a 300-acre parcel on the list. The man coming off the combine is friendly, knows every tile line on the place, and tells you straight away he doesn't own it. He rents it from a widow in town. Or from three cousins, one of them in Denver.

You've just met the owner a farmland parcel list hides best, the one who doesn't farm it.

To contact an absentee landowner, skip the parcel and find the person. Start with the owner name and mailing address on the county record. Then check who that address really belongs to. It may be the owner. It may also be a trust officer, a farm manager or a parent who died years ago. Reach the person who can sign where they actually read, with an email or phone number tied to them and not to the land. On farmland, plan for the tenant too, because the owner will ask him about you before he answers.

What counts as an absentee landowner on farmland

Search "absentee owner" and nearly every page is written for house flippers. Their definition is simple: the owner's mailing address differs from the property address. On farmland that test says little. A bare 80-acre field has no house for anyone to live in, so nearly every owner looks absent, including the one who farms it every day.

The useful definition for a developer is USDA's. A non-operator landlord is an owner who rents the land to someone else to farm. In USDA's 2014 national survey of landowners, 39 percent of farmland in the lower 48 states was rented, and 80 percent of that rented land was owned by landlords who didn't farm it.

On farmland, absentee rarely means far away. Landlords living within 50 miles of their land owned 67 percent of rented acres. Those more than 1,000 miles away owned 4 percent.

So the typical absentee owner on your list lives in the county seat or the next town over. They just don't farm.

The national picture hides big swings by state. American Farmland Trust surveyed non-operator landowners in 13 states. The median owner who lived off the land was 15 miles away in Iowa and 22 in Illinois, but 143 miles away in Kansas, 145 in Texas and 152 in Washington. Only 16 percent of Texas respondents lived on the land they rented out.

And most of them didn't buy it. In 11 of those 13 states, owners got the land mainly by inheriting it. In Texas, 81 percent had inherited.

Why your letter misses them

A mailer goes to the address on the tax record. For the owner who lives in town and opens her mail, that works. For the rest of the list, it fails in a few specific ways.

The address is a trust department. When land sits in a trust, the person who can sign is the trustee, and the mailing address is often a bank or a family member acting for everyone. A solar letter there gets filed with the trust's other mail. We cover who signs in solar lease land in a trust.

The address is a farm manager. Some owners hire a farm management company to run the leasing and the books. Farmers National Company, which has served landowners since 1929, says it helps owners with leasing agreements and farm accounting. Your letter then reaches someone whose day job is the current farm lease, not a decision the owner has never been asked about.

The address belongs to an heir's parent. The county still shows the name of the owner who died. The children who inherited it may live in three states, and the bill still goes to their late father's address.

The letter goes to the farm. Anything delivered to the parcel, or left at the farmhouse by an agent, lands with the tenant.

None of these owners said no. Most never saw the question. That's the same ceiling we describe in why landowner mailers get 1 to 2 percent.

The tenant is the first person the owner asks

This is the part every absentee-owner guide leaves out, because house flippers don't deal with it.

When a solar letter does reach a non-operator owner, they'll usually ask the person farming the land about it first. In American Farmland Trust's survey, owners in 12 of the 13 states named their farm operator as their top source of information. Most rent to someone they know well, a neighbor, a family friend or a relative. Many of those deals are a handshake. Across the groups AFT compared, more than half the leases were verbal and most ran year to year.

The tenant is also the one who loses. Indiana Public Media reported in 2024 on a farmer who had lost 400 acres of rented ground to solar. As a renter, he saw none of the payments that went to the owner.

So the owner's trusted adviser on your project is often the person whose income it takes away. You can't change that. You can make sure the owner hears from you first, and hears it with an answer ready for the tenant question.

Do you need the tenant's permission?

No. The owner signs the option and the lease. But the farm lease has to end before construction, and owners know it, so that question comes early.

The rules differ by state. In Iowa, a farm lease renews for another crop year unless notice is given by September 1, and the lease then ends the following March 1. That applies to oral and written leases alike. Your counsel will know your state's version.

What the owner wants to hear is simple. When does my renter have to stop? Does he get paid for the crop in the ground? Can he keep farming the acres you don't use? Your team should have those answers before the first call, not after.

How to reach the owner who can sign

The house-flipper pages say buy an absentee list and mail it. On a solar parcel list you already have the list. What you need is the person behind each row.

1. Sort the list by who you're trying to reach. Owners who live nearby and owners far away. Trusts and LLCs. Owners who have died, and land run by a farm manager. Each one takes a different kind of work.
2. Find the person behind each address. For a trust, the trustee. For an LLC, the manager named in the state business filings. For an owner who died, the heirs in the probate records. For a farm manager's address, the owner behind the manager.
3. Contact the person, not the parcel. An email address or phone number that belongs to them. Keep mailing too. The owner in his late seventies who reads every letter is still a mail person.
4. Write for someone who doesn't farm. Many of these owners inherited the land and may not know its acreage by heart. Give them a yearly figure for their parcel, say which part of the land you'd use, and say what happens to their renter.
5. Follow up. Most owners don't answer the first time, whatever the channel. A parcel that went quiet after one letter hasn't said no, as we explain in what to do with a parcel list you've already mailed.
6. Answer fast when they write back. An owner who replies is about to talk to the tenant, a sibling or a lawyer. The first real answer they get should be yours.

The owners who don't farm are already on your list

Every parcel on your list that's rented out has two people attached to it. One farms it and is easy to find. The other can sign, and is the one your mail is least likely to reach.

You don't have a land problem. You have a contact problem.

That's the part we run. For every parcel, we find the person who can actually sign, using the deed, state business filings and probate records instead of the stale tax address. We email every owner on the list and follow up with the quiet ones. When an owner writes back wanting to talk, your team knows in seconds, with the name, parcel and phone number in hand. Your team takes the call and signs.

On one campaign for a developer in Georgia, 1 in 9 parcels wanted to talk about a lease once their owners were reached this way.

If you want a rough sense of how many owners on your list never saw your letter, put your parcel count into the calculator.