Lazy days ahead

I’ve just finished my 45th harvest and it’s been one of the best. 

It seemed like a good time to hand over control, so from February 1 the young cousins now manage day-to-day operations of the farm business. 

A few things guided us to the decision to merge farms with the cousins. 

Firstly, we wanted to keep farming. Selling up and retiring wasn’t attractive. 

Secondly, we needed to properly resource the business. Farms are now such complex enterprises and you need highly skilled people to operate them. And you need to work extreme hours through the peak periods of sowing and harvest to get the job done in a timely manner.

We’d found it very difficult to do this with mainly employed labour. Under the merged structure we’ll have six family members contributing to the planning and operations of the business, supported by a further six employees. 

Of course, a critical factor is we know each other well. My father and uncle worked together before splitting the farm when the eldest sons came home. There was no animosity between them, they just did what was typical for that generation.

 But does that make sense? Build scale only to halve it every 20 to 30 years? 

We’re not naive to the potential pitfalls in what we’re doing. But it seems to me the business advantages are clear. Failure of family partnerships is usually caused by personality issues. So if we create a structure that separates personal life from the business – as much as is practicable in a farm business – and put some clear rules around roles and responsibilities, we can remove the most frequent tension points. 

Succession is a challenging issue for many farming families. How do you balance the expectation of family members who don’t have active involvement in the farm, with the need to build scale?

Should you provide equal value to all siblings? Everyone has a calculator and with the book value of a typical family farm now very high, there’s intense interest from all family members keen to get a piece of the action.

But does the book value truly reflect the productive capacity of the farm – the ability to make a living? 

There’s no one answer how best to manage generational change or transition to retirement. But if you actually like farming and want to continue to be involved, without necessarily crawling around under the air-seeder at 3am on a cold night, there are options.

 It could be co-operation with members of your extended family, as in our case. It could be forming a partnership with an aspiring farmer who doesn’t have the capital to enter farming or to expand from a modest base.

Whatever the approach, it has to start with open and honest discussion between the key stakeholders. And the best time to start that discussion is now.