Turmoil In Farm Transitions

Driving out of the western Iowa town of Panora, the winding roads offer broad vistas of rolling hills. Many of the mailboxes along Redwood Road show the name Arganbright. Jim Arganbright grew up in this area, one of 10 children. He and his wife, Beverly, have eight kids.

Though Jim Arganbright farmed here his whole life, three years ago at the age of 80 he started renting his cropland to his son Tom, the only one of his children who farms full-time. Now, all Jim Arganbright has to worry about is the livestock — and he doesn’t have too much of that.

“I only have 12 cows and a bull and eight calves,” he said.

Tom Arganbright farms his parents' 160 acres, several other rented fields and his own farm – in all, about 1,500 acres. He bought some of his acres from one of his uncles and one of Tom’s five children currently farms with him.

“It’s not just any ground you're purchasing, it's part of the original Arganbright land and it's up to you to keep a hold of it through good times and bad and be able to pass it along to the next generation,” Arganbright said.

The Arganbrights are firm in their connection to the land, but exactly how land gets passed from one generation to the next can vary widely. And not all farmers plan ahead for the change.

Though Jim Arganbright is no longer farming, he said he has not yet established a formal plan for how ownership of his land will transfer to the next generation, something he knows he ought to do. He expects his children to keep it in the family.

Randy Hertz, a financial planner with Hertz Farm Management in Nevada, Iowa, says even as the average age of farmers creeps ever upward, few families make all the plans they could for smooth transitions.

“It's pretty ominous the number of farmers that plan to retire in the next five to 10 years,” Hertz said. “Some of them have no plan and the default succession plan is, well, I guess we’ll just rent it to somebody in the neighborhood.”

The 2008 Iowa Farm and Rural Life poll found that 42 percent of farmers surveyed said they planned to retire in the next five years. But Paul Lasley, an Iowa State University sociologist who conducted the poll, said it’s tough to define retirement with farmers.

“The retirement process for many farmers may take years – even a decade or so,” Lasley said. “They slowly phase out of farming and allow their adult children, who are often middle age, to take over, but they remain somewhat involved to ‘make sure the kids do it right.’”

Sometimes even a careful succession plan can turn up uncomfortable obstacles that strain family relationships.

Devan Green is a 27-year-old farmer in Conrad, Iowa. His buildings are old — he says many haven’t been updated since the 1970s. Broken or abandoned equipment rusts on the edges of the pasture where cows, pigs, sheep and ducks graze.

Green worked alongside his dad throughout high school and college. After graduating, he came home to farm full-time and that’s when his family re-organized things a bit. Charles Green, Devan’s father, had been both a shareholder and an employee of the family corporation that owned the farm. But the corporation couldn’t support two employees, so Devan and Charles both rented family land. They converted the acres to organic production and direct-marketed the meat they raised.

Then, last September, Charles Green died suddenly, leaving Devan on his own. And the remaining shareholders — Devan’s grandparents, aunts and uncles, and mother — started looking more critically at the business structure.

“When my dad was farming [the land], they just said, `He’s farming it, that’s great,’” Green said. But now some family members, he said, want a greater return on their land and Green said his priorities of sustainability and diversified livestock do not sit well with everyone.

“Being certified organic, I probably deviated from that vision of ‘we want to be a large grain production farm,’” Green said.

Without his father, Green couldn’t farm as much this year as the two of them had in the past. He let go of some of his rented acres, but he’s still paying rent for, and farming, the family land. He’s also looking around to see whether he could buy his own farm.

“My real dream is to be able to own the farm and my family has already stated that there’s no way that’s going to happen here,” Green said.