25 U.S.C. § 402 — Leases of surplus lands

This section lets a tribe's council lease out the tribe's "surplus lands" — land the tribe has beyond what individual members hold — for farming. The council does not need a new set of rules to do this. Instead, farming leases must follow the same rules, regulations, and length of lease term that applied to grazing leases as of August 15, 1894. That date locks in the older grazing-lease framework as the model: whatever rules and time limits governed how a grazing lease could be made, and how long it could run, apply the same way to a farming lease under this section. The section does not create new standards just for farming leases — it extends the existing grazing-lease rules to cover farming too. It also does not spell out what those 1894 grazing-lease rules actually were; this section does not define them itself, so knowing the exact terms and time limits allowed requires looking at the grazing-lease law that was in effect on that date.