Community members learn about farm succession planning at free workshop

Attendees learned about farm succession planning during the two hour free workshop at the Vernon County Fairgrounds on Thursday. The workshop was provided by the Missouri Department of Agriculture in partnership with University of Missouri Extension.

Photo by Sarah Haney | Daily Mail Editor

Community members who own a farm were able to get help in the planning process of guiding their family farming business to the next generation with a workshop in Nevada last week. The workshop was held from noon to 2:30 p.m., last Thursday at the Vernon County Fairgrounds. Although the workshop was free, registration was encouraged as a meal was provided.

According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the average age of U.S. and Missouri farm producers was 57 years old. However, in the national 2014 Tenure, Ownership, and Transition of Agricultural Land Survey, only 17 percent of U.S. farmers surveyed said they planned to retire by 2019, as reported by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Of the farm owners who said they were planning to retire, 53 percent had no succession plan, and only 19 percent had a successor who currently works on the farm. These data suggest that farmers struggle to adequately prepare the next generation for both farm management and farm ownership, two important components of farm succession.

Farm succession is a process that gradually accomplishes two goals:

• Readies the farm’s next generation to take farm management and ownership control

• Prepares the senior operators to transition into different on- or off- farm roles.

While farms can use a transition plan to outline how the current operator will shift ownership to another operator, a transition plan that did not account for how to hand off management control from the senior operator to the next generation gave the farm little chance to succeed. Farm families often overlook the management transition as they plan their farms’ future. Successfully transitioning the management of a business is complicated and requires strong communication and careful timing.

Senior farm operators who desire for their farms to continue operating successfully after they are gone need a succession plan. In the plan, they detail how to slowly prepare their successors to make decisions for all aspects of the farm business — from production to financial and from human resources to strategy — and become the farm’s primary owners and managers.

The Missouri Department of Agriculture had partnered with the University of Missouri Extension to provide funding and programming for a Succession Planning workshop series. The free two-hour workshop covered a number of topics.