By Simon de Boer August 14, 2015
Back when I was in grade 5 and 6, I often checked the time on the church steeple, and concluded that older people were wrong when they said that time was moving fast. Now I have noticed that time seems to move a whole lot faster than I once thought it did. Life has changed. The advice we got at a seminar, "you can never start too early with succession planning," I now give to others. Maybe one of the reasons that we put the making of wills and succession plans on the backburner is that we don't like getting older.
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For us it was a long process. Our oldest son informed us in his 3rd week of grade 6 that he was quitting school and coming home to farm with us. He did stay in school and earned his diploma at Ridgetown College in 2001. But from that September day in 1992 I had a very good indication that we needed to prepare for the future.
Now we are living in a house 1 km away from the farm now operated by our son and his family. This did not just happen. It was a long and sometimes painful process. It was hard for us to leave the farmhouse and move into a much smaller one.
One good thing is that there is lots of help available to work with and advise you, although not all of it is free. We had to sort out all the advice to suit our situation; there is no one-size-fits-all solution. We also had to listen and explore our son and daughter-in -law's plans and visions. How do they see the future? We had to reckon with the large increase in land values, the ever-increasing cost of doing business, changes in the marketplace and a host of other rules and regulations. And then there are the unexpected issues that pop up. They do not make life easier at the time, but can be overcome when you work together.
What lessons did we learn in the process? Disagreements can start in very unimportant maters. Decision-making will be done by the next generation, although maybe not all at once. You don't have to get up in the middle of the night for a cow that is calving and you do get used to a smaller house, where you don't see all that goes on at the farm anymore.
My wife and I are getting used to our new roles on the farm. Sometimes we are supplying labour or at other times giving advice. Handing farms over is never easy, but neither is it easy for the next generation. It takes a lot of goodwill and effort from both the older and younger generations to make it work. Planning for the future of our farm meant planning for the future of our children and grandchildren too. We've really come to see how true it is that you can never start too early with succession planning. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Simon de Boer is on the Board of Directors for the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario. The CFFO Commentary represents the opinions of the writer and does not necessarily represent CFFO policy. The CFFO Commentary is heard weekly on CFCO Chatham, CKNX Wingham, and UCB Canada radio stations in Chatham, Belleville, Bancroft, Brockville and Kingston. It is also archived on the CFFO website: www.christianfarmers.org. CFFO is supported by 4,000 family farmers across Ontario.
