Farm Law and Ag Law Blog

     Part II-Reasons Plans Do Not Get Established.   (Authors’ Note :   This will be a several part series discussing why the current method of farm estate and succession planning is not working)  Last month we discussed the fact that statistics show that in the past 10 years, there really has not been much in the form of improvement as to estate and succession plans being created by farmers.      Overall, 75% of farms in the country do not have a succession plan, and that number is roughly the same from ten years ago.   Probably a good follow up analysis, which I have never seen anyone perform, is of the 25% of farms that do have a succession plan, what percentage of those are successful? Continuing our march towards identifying what is wrong with farm succession planning and how to fix it, we need to first look at the upcoming “farmestateaggeddon” that will happen this decade.   According to USDA data, a whopping one-third of America’s 3.4 million farmers are over the ag

                                Part I-Reasons Plans Do Not Get Established.  (Authors’ Note :   This will be a several part series discussing why the current method of farm estate and succession planning is not working.   In this first part, we will discuss the current state of farm succession and estate planning and compare to where it was ten years ago)         After several years of the farm economy in the doldrums, that past 2 years have seen a reassurance leading to record land and machinery prices, as well as just about everything else. Prior to this, many farms were not even sure they would survive long enough to need a succession plan.   Now, we’ve returned to where we were around 2009, 2010, and 2011, when the size of farm estates grew greatly and made it very difficult, if not impossible, for farming heirs to buy out non farming heirs due to the large capital outlay.   With land and machinery at all times highs, the difficulty is even now more profound.              The