Farm families need to get around the table for weekly business meetings.
However, that table shouldn’t be the kitchen table, Leona Dargis told Manitoba farmers at Keystone Agricultural Producers’ annual meeting Jan. 27.
“You want that place to be focusing on the family,” said Dargis, an Alberta farm kid, Nuffield scholar and survivor of family tragedy .
“What you want to try to avoid is those conflict situations of bringing up business from the farm at the kitchen table.”
Farms are both businesses and families, so keeping special places for each is important.
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Instead of arguing about business in the house, Dargis said, families should schedule regular farm business meetings for everyone in-volved in the operation and hold them somewhere neutral, such as in the office or machine shop.
Dargis and her four sisters had to deal with the shock of their parents dying in a plane crash.
The sisters were in their teens and 20s and even though they had begun easing into succession discussions, few details had been worked out.
The parents’ will was out of date, which helped drag out the estate settlement for more than six years.
However, the sisters were uncertain which of them wanted to keep farming.
Dargis said it’s not just major issues that families need to talk about. Farms require constant communication to be viable businesses.
“Every farm today is a business,” said Dargis.
At least once a week, every person involved in the farm should be part of a meeting in which the farm’s issues, ideas and challenges are discussed, she said. It’s an essential way to head off problems.
“The more you start to do that, the more you will become better at dealing with conflict moving forward.”
