Count the big decisions on your farm that only you can make. The more of them rest on you alone, the bigger the risk to the farm’s future, and that risk weighs more than your age or a missing will. Seven decisions are worth checking: what to raise and plant, buying machinery, building, buying or selling land, when and where to sell, hiring, and whether someone in the family takes off-farm work. If you spend a week in hospital at harvest, the grain sale waits, because only you know when and to whom to sell. The bank calls, and nobody else can answer.
Age does not tell you whether this risk is there. In a 2023 survey of 403 US farmers by Purdue University economists, 55.1 percent had a written succession plan, and whether they had one was largely unrelated to the owner’s age. The survey measured written plans, not who makes the calls, but it shows that being younger guarantees nothing on paper. An owner of forty-five who makes every big call alone runs the same risk as one of seventy: if that owner is away, nobody else has been named to decide.
Why is the risk who decides, not who inherits?
The risk is a big decision that only one person makes, with nobody else named to make it. When that person is away or ill, the decision waits, and so does the work that depends on it. A will does not fix this. In a will you name who gets the land after you die; it has no line for who decides what to plant next season, or who signs when a buyer calls this week.
That is why the tool is a business plan and not an estate plan. Sappey and colleagues reviewed farm succession in Australia in 2012, in an Australian accounting and business journal. They define succession planning as a business plan made before the owners retire or die, separate from inheritance planning, which mostly means the will. In their review, control of decisions is handed over gradually, in stages. So the job is to hand decisions over on purpose, while you are still there to show someone how.
Which decisions wait when only one person can make them?
Not every call carries this risk. Much of the daily work, like feeding, milking or spraying, can run for a week without you if the crew knows the routine. Sappey and colleagues list seven decisions whose control passes from one generation to the next, and for each one the question is who makes it today.
| Decision | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Livestock and crops | What to raise and what to plant |
| Machinery | Buying a harvester, a tractor or other major equipment |
| New infrastructure | A dam, a pumping system, a shed |
| Land | Buying more land or selling some |
| Selling | When and where to sell the crop or the stock |
| Hiring | Whether to take on workers, and whom |
| Off-farm income | Whether someone in the family takes paid work off the farm |
The test for each is plain: if you were not there tomorrow, could someone else make this call, and make it well? Where the answer is no, the decision rests on you alone, and it is the one to hand over first. Some, like when to sell, can cost money within days; others, like buying land, can wait months, but nobody else can settle them.
Why does the succession plan keep getting put off?
An owner who makes every decision alone feels little pressure to write down how they are made, because from where they stand nothing is going wrong. The delay is not usually laziness. In a 2009 study in the Journal of Extension, a US journal for farm advisers, Kaplan and colleagues looked at nine farm families whose succession planning had stalled. They found that unresolved family issues were a barrier to talking about succession, though nine families are too few to say how common that is.
Waiting for a certain age does not help either. In the Purdue survey, farms with a written plan tended to use other good management practices too, such as written leases and standard procedures for routine tasks, whatever the owner’s age. A written plan goes with the habit of writing things down, not with age.
What does the plan not decide for you?
Writing down who covers each decision is not the same as choosing who takes over the farm one day. Here you are not picking a successor, and you are not assuming anyone wants the job; that has to be asked of each person in the family. In a farm succession guide from University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, Joy Kirkpatrick and a co-author call the family’s values, vision and intentions the key step that is often overlooked. In practice, each person tells the other generations what they intend to do, and the rest of the plan is built on those answers.
The plan also stops at a clear line. Inheritance, dividing the estate, taxes, and the company or trust structure are work for an attorney and an accountant where you farm. What stays with you is management: who decides what, and when each decision passes to someone else. Keeping the two apart lets you hand over management now, while the estate work takes its own, slower course.
What is the first step that does not wait for anyone to die?
The first thing to write is not the whole plan. It is the answer to one question: if you could not make the calls tomorrow, who signs, who instructs the crew, who talks to the bank, and who has the passwords? Call it the interim answer: it covers the gap until the family sits down to plan. It takes about fifteen minutes, does not mention death, and is the part that has to work without warning.
Then take it out of your head and into a meeting. Jessica Groskopf, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recommends a regular business meeting for the people who make the major decisions, held monthly or quarterly. In it, each person’s role, the way decisions are made and what was agreed get written down. She presents it as a normal habit for any business, not a crisis measure. If your family does not hold one yet, the interim answer is a good first item.
Where to start
It takes about an hour and one sheet of paper.
To count the decisions that rest on you alone in about a minute, the succession mini-check is a short online check on the same seven decisions. To go from this sheet to a full plan, the article on the written succession plan covers which decisions go into the plan and when each one passes.