From the article, breach of contract is the issue. Cutting down trees, cutting roads, etc. is pretty easy to prove and most courts would allow that, without written permission from the property lessor, as breach incidents. Annual proof of insurance and revenue statements for tax purposes have been standard in every commercial lease I ever entered into. Not surprising the court ordered him to vacate.
I read somewhere that the contract had provisions for trail clearing, etc, since the lessee is running an "off-road" park.
Who knows exactly how the contract reads, but if the landowner wants out of a 25 year contract only three years in, the attorneys had to come up with something.
The landowner has 50,000 acres - I wonder why he can't use the other 47,500 acres. The off-road park is behind an industrial park. Surely - they won't be building an airport that close to the the other warehouses.
There's a farm family near where I used to live. They had two offers for their property - one from the town - to preserve it as open space, and another from a builder - to develop. The builder's offer was several MILLION dollars more. The landowner was going to accept the builder's offer. To stop that from happening, the town condemned the property. That's just wrong.