I recently created a Power of Attorney for my parents. Of course, I should have done this years ago, but as always with these sorts of things, I’ve never been able to get it done. Better late than never, I guess.
Before I go any further, for those of you who know our family, I should say that both of my parents are in excellent health and will no doubt continue to annoy me for years to come.
See also: Business Clinic: How do you structure your business/succession plan?
About the Author
Will Evans
Farmers Weekly Opinion Writer
Will Evans works with his wife and parents, farming beef cattle and arable crops on 200 hectares of land near Wrexham in North Wales.
And I certainly can’t allow them to grow old and infirm.
There is too much work to do on farms and they need cheap labor more than ever.
Still, it’s good to have the legal issues sorted out for peace of mind for everyone involved.
Now’s your chance
In fact, it was so easy I completed it all online in a morning.
But emotionally, it was much harder than I had imagined, as so many future scenarios came to mind that I didn’t want to think about.
I guess it’s just part of a process that we all have to go through at some point in our lives.
After all, time has a nasty habit of marching on inexorably.
But why do we find these succession discussions so difficult and put off in our farming families?
I have a lot of friends in similar situations right now, and the number of people struggling far outnumber those who aren’t.
This predicament is extremely unfortunate as individuals are simply unwilling to discuss their long-term future and its impacts, creating uncertainty and confusion for all involved, and disagreements over the size of an inheritance can threaten to completely tear families and businesses apart.
Perhaps we need some kind of industry roadmap for this, where the potential outcomes can be calmly and rationally discussed, coordinated with outside experts, explained, and ultimately decisions implemented.
I think there are a lot of places where that would be quite useful.
But are farmers ever calm and rational? If they were, they wouldn’t be farming in the first place.
asset management
Ironically, given that so many of us choose to work so closely together, I believe it is not one another that causes most of our problems, but rather the highly complex and emotional relationship we have with the collection of land and buildings we call the farm.
In a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world, love seems to be a constant and reassuring presence in our lives, especially when it is something that has been nurtured by the blood, sweat and tears of generations of families.
Maybe that’s why we’re so focused on it that we don’t even have the time to think about what will happen when we’re no longer around to shape the farm’s future.
Our judgement is clouded by high emotions, and it is too painful to speak up, even to the family members who are most affected by our stubborn silence, even though deep down we know we should.
We rely too much on our dead ancestors in this industry and worry too much about what they will think and say about us on our farms.
But I think if they could somehow talk to us, the first advice they would give would be to listen to each other, not to listen to what they have to say.