Succession mini-check
Who decides what on your farm?
Seven decisions keep a farm running. On how many of them are you the only one who decides? It takes a minute, and at the end you see where the farm stops if you step away.
Where your decisions fall
Each decision appears by the column of who decides and the row of how fast the farm feels your absence. The top-left corner is where the farm stops most without you.
Each decision's height follows the urgency the studies describe (selling has a window; buying land can wait), not a measured number.
What this means for the farm
Handing over a farm is not your will, and it is not your age. Command over each decision changes hands like a ladder, one rung at a time, over years: first the day-to-day, then the strategic calls, and last of all the money. On a farm that is getting ready, that climb has already begun. The decisions below, the ones that rest on you alone, are rungs no one has climbed yet, not even once.
The generation in charge today
What the research shows
- 55%of producers have a written succession plan, and age barely tells you who.Purdue, 403 producers
- 29%of family farms have no successor lined up.Ferrari and colleagues, Brazil
- 1 in 6farms have no one ready to take over ownership or management.Iowa, USA, 2022
To reflect on
You may think this is a problem for a few years from now. A study of 403 producers found that age barely tells you who has already put the plan on paper: it is not a task for the old, it is for whoever manages well, at any age. And it is not about dying. It is about the day you are in a hospital bed and someone has to sign, talk to the bank, and instruct the crew. Be careful, too, about who you assume will take over: in a study of rural youth in Brazil, willingness to stay varied widely, and many already did not want to. Concentration is comfortable because, from the inside, nothing looks broken. It only shows up on the first day you are not there.