Either a document names the person and the date, or the answer is whatever the family assembles under pressure. In a survey of 403 producers across the United States run by Purdue University in April 2023, 222 of the 403 farms held one, which Table 2 of the report gives as 55.1 percent. The same survey found that having one was largely unrelated to operator age, and the figure the table prints for age is faint enough that the authors do not stand behind it at all.
What separated the two groups was a set of other written practices. Crop leases in writing, financial ratios used when deciding, documented crop pricing performance and standard operating procedures written down for routine tasks each travel with holding a written plan, and all four hold up firmly in the survey’s own table. None of those four is a statement about intention. Each of them is a document somebody can be handed.
Age not predicting it is the finding worth carrying. The document behaves like a management practice and not like a stage of life, which is why the authors close by saying that well managed farms don’t wait until retirement age approaches to develop a written succession plan. A farm of 45-year-olds with no plan is not early. It is missing the same artifact as a farm of 70-year-olds with no plan.
How far apart the two groups actually sit
Far enough that the table is the argument, and close enough that part of the distance is built into the ruler. The Purdue survey scored managerial ability from six management practice questions, and the first of the six asks whether the farm has written succession plans in place. Scores run from 6 to 12, one point per practice, so a farm with a plan starts the index one point ahead of an otherwise identical farm without one.
| Managerial ability score | Farms with a written plan | Farms without one |
|---|---|---|
| Below average, 6 to 7 | 2.3% | 27.1% |
| Average, 8 to 10 | 56.3% | 66.3% |
| Above average, 11 to 12 | 41.4% | 6.6% |
Read the top and bottom rows against each other, then discount them. Roughly one farm in four without a plan scores below average, against about one in forty-three among farms that have one, that second figure being our arithmetic on the 2.3 percent the table prints, and above-average scores run 41.4 percent against 6.6 percent. Part of that spread is definitional rather than discovered.
One of the six points is the plan itself, so a table split by the plan and scored partly on the plan will separate on the plan, and the link between managerial ability and succession planning, which the authors report as the strongest of the eighteen characteristics they measured, carries the same circularity inside it. The authors add a second limit of their own: the two things travel together, and nothing in the survey shows that one causes the other. Nothing here says that writing the plan raises the score either.
The five practices scored independently of the plan are where the argument actually rests. Written lease agreements ran 67.6 percent against 51.9 percent between the two groups, documented crop pricing performance 69.8 percent against 48.6 percent, and standard operating procedures for routine tasks 57.2 percent against 40.3 percent. Use of agronomic consultants is the one that does not separate them, at 58.6 percent against 55.8 percent, and the survey finds nothing there at all. Four practices apart and one flat is a weaker claim than one headline number, and it is the claim the data will hold.
What the national number counts, and what it leaves out
Involvement, not a finished document. Giri, Subedi and Callahan, writing in Choices, the outreach publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, report from the 2022 US Census of Agriculture that 61% of all farms had engaged in estate or succession planning in 2022, which the same article puts at four percentage points below the 65% recorded in 2017. Four points off 65 is a relative fall of about 6 percent, and that second reading is ours, not theirs.
Involvement rose with size, at 73 percent in 2017 and 72 percent in 2022 among farms of 500 acres or more, which is close to 200 hectares by our conversion, and it fell to 48 percent among farms selling under $2,500 a year in US dollars. Both are counts of who reported being involved, cut by size, and neither says which farms need the page. The farm with the least room to absorb a bad handover is not the big one.
Their own caveat is the part a farm should keep, that engagement in estate or succession planning may be distinct from actually having a succession plan in place, because the census question only asks whether a person was involved in such planning. Sixty-one percent involved and 55.1 percent holding a written plan come from two different instruments and two different years, and the pairing is ours rather than either source’s. The gap between being involved in a thing and having produced the thing is where most of this subject lives.
Succession is not inheritance, and the difference is the whole scope
One transfers control while the owner is alive, the other transfers assets after death. A study of Australian farm succession published in the Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal defines the first as the development of a business plan prior to the death or retirement of the existing farm owners, as distinct from inheritance planning, usually taking the main form of a will where ownership is transferred to a subsequent generation upon death, and names the three things at stake as ownership, income and operations.
The same review notes that in many cases full legal ownership is not transferred until after the farmer’s death, which delays transfer of financial control and of control over the long-term direction of the business. A will settles who owns the ground. It settles nothing about who decides what the ground produces in the next cycle, and a farm that has done the will and stopped has answered the smaller of the two questions.
The three components the document has to move
Assets, management and income, and only one of them is a management question. Wisconsin Extension states that all businesses have three components: assets, management, and income, and that a transition has to include all three. Assets and income are where the attorney and the accountant earn their fee, and the record of the tax regime is the page that tells them which rules the farm has been filing under all this time. The middle one gets skipped because nobody bills for it, and it is the only one of the three that the planning axis has any business touching, because it is the only one that resolves into a decision somebody on the farm makes and records.
Management splits again into structure and control, and the control half is a list of questions the farm can answer this week: Who makes the decisions concerning the business and how are such decisions made? Does one individual make the decision or are decisions made by a process of consultation and collaboration? Who participates in making decisions? What factors are considered in making decisions? Who makes the short-term and who makes the long-term decisions? Five questions, all of them answerable without a lawyer, and none of them answerable by a will.
Which decisions the document has to assign, one at a time
Named decisions with a date each, rather than a general handover. The Australian review sets out what a succession arrangement has to resolve operationally, at what point in the process each generation can or cannot decide, and the list comes to seven. Copy the rows onto one page and fill the columns in.
| Decision | Who holds it today | Who holds it after the next stage | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stock and crops chosen | |||
| Capital equipment bought, harvesters among it | |||
| New permanent infrastructure paid for, dams and pumps among it | |||
| Land bought, or land the farm holds sold | |||
| Where and when the product gets sold | |||
| Labour employed or not | |||
| Off-farm income taken or not |
A form, not an essay. The date on each row is when that stage begins, and the second column is the one that has to carry a name in all seven rows before the page counts as written.
The row for capital equipment arrives half answered on a farm that keeps a written investment plan, because that sheet already carries the year each purchase is meant to happen and the condition that has to be true first. It also exposes the arrangement that looks finished and is not, where the successor has been named for years and holds none of the seven. The same review says a succession plan’s critical aspect is that there is actually someone to succeed, and having someone is what all seven rows presuppose, not a line added at the end.
Why nobody can hand you a template
Because the variables are farm-specific by construction, and the source that lists them says so. After setting out the pre-retirement transfer forms, from employing the owner’s children for a wage through trusts, incorporation, purchase by the children and outright transfer, the Australian review concludes that a guide matching those forms to circumstances is unlikely except in very general terms because of the diversity of individual circumstances and preferences.
This is the honest reason the document keeps getting postponed, and it is a better reason than reluctance. There is no form to fill out, so the work looks unbounded. It is not unbounded, it is just unwritten by anyone else: the seven decisions above, the five control questions, one name and one date per row. What the farm already declared about itself in the written SWOT analysis and in written mission, vision and values is the input to those rows, because a successor inherits a direction along with the machinery.
What actually delays it, measured
Something happening in the successor’s life, more often than resistance from the owner. Kaplan and colleagues ran 20 semi-structured interviews with adult members of nine small Pennsylvania farm families in 2003 and 2004, some of them with more than one relative present at once, so the count is of interviews and not of people, and the number of individuals is never reported. They found that parents of four of the nine families, which the article puts at 44%, made comments indicating significant delays in their families’ succession plans due to unresolved issues or uncertainty tied to the lives of individual family members, most commonly their children’s career choices and their personal relationships.
One father in that study named the asymmetry in ten words: It’s easier to talk about farm issues than family issues. Nine families is a small, non-representative sample and the authors say the findings cannot be generalized. The practical use of the finding survives the caveat anyway, because a farm waiting on a 24-year-old’s decision about whether to come back is waiting on something it cannot schedule, and the interim answer to who decides tomorrow does not depend on that decision at all.
The two dates that make it a document
The date it was written and the date it gets read again. A succession plan with only the first is a photograph of a family that has since changed. Jessica Groskopf, writing for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Agricultural Profitability, puts business meetings on a monthly or quarterly cadence and asks that notes go out afterwards with tasks and a deadline for those to be completed, which is the mechanism this document needs and rarely gets. A task with a name and a date on it is the last of the four functions of management doing its work on paper, and a plan reviewed on no cadence never reaches it.
The interim answer is the field most plans omit. Decide who signs, who instructs the operators, who talks to the lender, and who holds the passwords, starting tomorrow morning and lasting until the family can meet. One entry on that list comes up most weeks rather than once in a lifetime, which is the community support record when a neighbor, a school or a parish asks for a machine, an animal or an afternoon.
Write the decision down, name the person it falls on, and put the date the arrangement was agreed beside it. That answer is short, it is not about death, and it is the only part of the plan that has to work without warning. When the honest interim answer to a row is that nobody inside the farm can hold it, that row stops being a family question and turns into a written hiring process, with a requirement and a date of its own. Whether the people it names already know they are named is the test that asking each person separately is for.
Where to start
One page, seven rows, two dates, about two hours to decide the interim answer and fill it in with whoever needs to be in the room, and a copy somewhere other than the office.
Filed under old age is where this document goes to not get written, and the survey evidence puts it closer to the written lease agreement than to the will. A farm that writes it at 45 is doing bookkeeping, not confronting mortality. Decide the interim answer this week and the rest of the page stops being a conversation about dying and turns into a work order, with somebody’s name on it and a date it comes back for review.
Nobody has to agree with the choice for the page to do its work. They only have to be able to find it.