Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

If you are the record owner of the private road and your neighbor seeks to establish an easement by prescription, he must show that he used the subject property continuously for a period of five years in a manner which was open, notorious and clearly visible and adverse to you, the owner. If you have actively prevented your neighbor from using your road, you should be able to defeat a prescriptive easement claim.

The facts are not sufficient, and/or not sufficiently clear, to permit an accurate determination of whether the farmer has an easement at all, and if so, whether his daughter can use it to access the new house.

Several facts mentioned in your discussion point in different directions.

First, an easement is not abandoned by non-use.

Second, if the easement lies on the property before its sale, it's still there after the sale. A sale of land conveys all easements benefitting or burdening the property, whether mentioned in the sale documents or not.

Third, planting windbreak trees along an easement probably has no effect on it.

Fourth, an access easement ordinarily can be used either by the holder of the easement or by the owner of the property across which the easement lies, i.e., by the servient tenement or the dominant tenement.

Fifth, the holder of an easement cannot "over-burden" the easement by making significantly greater use of it, or a significantly different use of it, than the parties intended or foresaw at the time the easement was granted or reserved. Whether traffic to and from a single-family residence would be an over-burden on the easement in this case is somewhat doubtful.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to contact me directly with more facts, a sketch, etc.