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AGRICULTURE
Farm Succession Plan - Why a Farm Succession Plan? Download the fact sheet PDF Format
Statistics indicate that only 2-4% of farmers have a written farm succession plan - Radio transcripts based on an interview with John Anderson.
A lot of Canadian farmers are nearing retirement age. According to some estimates, about 120-thousand will celebrate their 65th birthday within the next ten years. Many will want to keep the farm in the family. But it seems few are preparing properly for the hand-off to the next generation. More in this report from Marshall Perrin of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
The numbers come from John Anderson, a senior project manager with the Canadian Farm Business Management Council: One hundred and twenty thousand farm families are headed by someone nearing retirement, but very few of those families are properly prepared for the transition.
The startling fact is that about 2 to 4 per cent of those families indicate that they actually have a succession plan in place: anything documented whatsoever. You can take a look at the people impact of that. But the second thing is, we're looking at approximately 50 billion dollars worth of assets that will have to be transferred in a business sense from one generation to the next within the next ten years. And yet less than 4 per cent have done proper planning.
Anderson says the other 96 per cent could be heading for trouble. He says succession planning is not something that farm families should leave to the last minute.
Some people do, but it's a high-risk venture just to wait and say we'll do it in, say, 24 hours. The analogy I use quite often is that if you're looking for a good home-cooked dinner, you've got to give mother some lead-time to prepare it. If you run in the house and say I want a quick meal, you're probably going to get a bologna and cheese sandwich.
And that, he says, is no way to care for the family's main financial asset, and it's no way to lay the foundation for the family's future. Anderson recommends that all farm families begin their succession planning as early as possible, and get the plan on paper. He says a good place to start is with the Canadian Farm Business Management Council, or an organization called Agri-success. It can be found on the Internet at www.agrisuccess.ca At Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, I'm Marshall Perrin.
Source: www.farmsuccession.com
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