WINNIPEG –There’s a saying on the rural joke circuit these days that parents who pass the farm along to their kids risk being charged with child abuse.
While that often gets a guffaw out of crowds, a Lethbridge family consultant says such black humor highlights an issue plaguing many farm families.
Should they be encouraging their kids to come back to the farm?
For Gordon Colledge, co-ordinator of a family studies program at Lethbridge Community College, the answer depends upon why they want them to and whether their kids are prepared to launch that farm into a new era.
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Colledge told farmers attending a Farm Business Challenges Conference here last week that parents need to assess their own aspirations before they decide whether to turn the operation over to the next generation.
“This is your farm, your business. Who says you are supposed to pass it down? There is no written law that says ‘I must give this over to my kids.’ “
Yet many parents and children assume that is the natural course of events — sometimes to the extreme. An Alberta man is currently suing his parents for the inheritance he considers his due — a share of the family ranch.
“He just couldn’t wait,” Colledge said.
For many families, the issue is clouded by myths and family traditions, including the idea that traditional patterns of operation will continue.
Leasing may be an alternative
But it’s becoming clear that for economic reasons the old ways won’t work in the new environment, Colledge said. Leasing land may be more viable in today’s economic climate than outright ownership, the farm may have to be diversified, or reduced to accommodate off-farm employment.
“We’re entering a new frontier,” he said.
Colledge said families must also assess whether children raised on prairie farms during the troubled 1980s have the optimism necessary to tackle management and technological challenges.
“Over the past 15 years, they’ve been fed a continuous diatribe of negativism,” Colledge said in an interview. The rapid and sometimes harsh structural change that has swept through the industry has left many families in a state of siege, rather than raring to go after the emerging opportunities.
“We could skip a generation, I could see the grandchildren being better suited. They’re not saddled with the blemishes of the old traditional ways.”
Whatever the farm family’s decision, Colledge said it is important to study the issue carefully, seek qualified help and put a succession plan into place that has a definite time frame so all players know what to expect.
