Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 27 this year, and for a lot of farm families it is the one weekend when everyone who might have a stake in the land sits at the same table. That makes it the best and the worst time to bring up succession. The best, because the people are there. The worst, because nobody wants to argue about the farm over pie. This article is about how to use the gathering to start the conversation without wrecking the holiday, and what the plan that follows should contain.
Why most farms still have no written plan
The numbers behind the problem are not new, but they keep getting bigger. USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture puts it plainly: more than a third of the country's 3.4 million farmers are over 65. The 2022 Census of Agriculture, released in February 2024, showed the average age of producers rising again, with the senior group growing faster than the young one. American Farmland Trust puts the farmland now set to change hands at more than 300 million acres.
Iowa has surveyed its farmland owners every five years since 1982, a study with no national equivalent, and the 2022 edition shows what that looks like on the ground: two thirds of Iowa farmland is owned by people 65 or older, and 37 percent by people 75 or older. Eighty percent of those owners can name a potential successor for ownership, but only 58 percent have decided who will manage the land, and 17 percent have no successor for either. Having someone in mind is not the same as having a plan.
Ask an extension educator what share of farmers have an up-to-date plan and you get the answer Nebraska's Allan Vyhnalek wrote down in 2022: "half, or just less than half." The reasons he lists are familiar. Nobody plans to retire. Nobody wants to give up control. Nobody wants to admit they will die. And nobody wants to take time away from the operation to think about what happens when they are no longer part of it.
The land still moves, plan or no plan. USDA's Economic Research Service found that most farmland expected to transfer passes through gifts, trusts and wills, and only about a quarter is sold between non-relatives. When there is no will, the state writes one for you. Nebraska Extension spells out what its intestacy rules do: with a surviving spouse and children of that marriage, the spouse takes the first $100,000 and half of the rest, and the children take the remainder, whatever the family would have chosen. Land that passes without a will or deed for a generation or two becomes heirs' property: jointly owned by a growing crowd of descendants, with no clear or marketable title, hard-pressed to qualify for USDA programs and open to a forced partition sale.
That is the case for starting early. The rest of this piece is about how.
Starting the conversation: the first family meeting
The mistake most families make is to open with the hardest question, who gets the farm, before anyone has the facts. Vyhnalek's first step is not a meeting at all. It is an inventory: what the farm owns, how each asset is titled, what is owed, and what it is worth. A one-page balance sheet turns a vague argument into a discussion about real things.
The family meeting comes second, and its purpose is to gather input, not to make decisions. The owners decide. Everyone else gets to be heard, which is what makes people feel part of the outcome. Nebraska's guidance on communicating a plan adds the practical rules: start early, pick a time when nobody is under stress, hold a group session so everyone hears the same thing, and follow it with one-on-one conversations where a quieter sibling can say what they would not say in front of the others.
For Thanksgiving weekend, that means one modest goal. Do not hold the meeting at the table. Instead, ask one question when the dishes are done: who wants to be part of a conversation about the future of the farm, and when in January can we sit down for it? Then put the date in writing. American Farmland Trust's Farm Transfer Toolkit is built around exactly this order: set goals, assess finances, communicate with stakeholders, then work with professionals.
Good first-meeting questions sound like these. What does each of us want the farm to look like in twenty years? Who wants to work here, and who wants to own here? These are different things. What does Mom and Dad's retirement actually cost? What would each person need to feel the outcome was fair? Our belief in nurturing families is not sentiment; a farm that loses the family loses its labor, its memory and its reason to stay in grass. A meeting that answers those questions is the first act of managing holistically: deciding what the whole is for before you divide the parts.
Fair is not always equal
Picture the classic case: three children, one of whom has worked on the farm for fifteen years at a wage the others would not have accepted. Split the land three ways and the farming child cannot buy the siblings out at today's land prices, so the farm is sold. Leave it all to the farming child and the other two feel written out. Neither "equal" nor "everything to one" is fair.
The approach extension educators teach starts by separating the operating assets from the rest. The child who farms gets the business, the equipment and the first claim on the land, often through a long lease with an option to buy, while the others receive non-farm assets. Where the non-farm assets are thin, life insurance can equalize the inheritance: Nebraska Extension describes a second-to-die policy on both parents, with the off-farm children as beneficiaries, paid out tax-free, if the policy is structured correctly, when the second parent dies, while the on-farm child inherits the operation. It is not free, premiums rise with age, and some people are uninsurable, so it belongs on the list early. We covered the broader insurance questions a farm should ask in an earlier piece.
Whatever the split, say it out loud and write the reasoning down. Sweat equity, prior help with a house or a degree, a child's medical needs: these are legitimate reasons for an unequal division, and the family that hears them from the parents accepts them far better than the family that reads them in a will. Surprise is what starts lawsuits.
Entity and lease tools
A succession plan is a set of documents, and the tools have changed. In the Iowa survey, willing the land to family is still the most common intended route, at 35 percent of acres, but trusts have climbed to 26 percent and business entities such as LLCs and partnerships now carry 12 percent. The reason is simple: an entity lets ownership move in slices. Parents can gift or sell membership units to the farming child year by year, keep management control while they want it, and give the off-farm children units that pay rent without a say in the fields. Ohio State's Planning for the Future of Your Farm bulletin series has plain-language guides on using business entities in a transition and on the legal tools that avoid probate. We walked through the entity choices themselves in Farm Business Structures.
Leases are the quiet workhorse of transition. About 39 percent of US farmland is rented, and retired farmers make up 38 percent of the non-operator landlords. A written lease between the parents and the successor, cash rent or crop share, lets income keep flowing to the retiring generation while management moves to the next one, and a lease with an option to purchase gives the successor a path to ownership that a bank can underwrite.
The tax side is less frightening than most families fear, but it needs an accountant in the room. The federal estate tax filing threshold is $13.99 million for deaths in 2025 and $15 million for 2026, and a surviving spouse can carry over the unused part. Most family farms will never owe it. What matters more for most is basis: inherited property generally takes the fair market value at the date of death as its basis, while gifted property carries the giver's old basis, so giving land away during life to "save estate tax" can hand the children a large capital gains bill instead. For the farms that do cross the threshold, section 2032A special-use valuation lets qualifying farm real estate be valued at its farm-use value rather than market value, within a cap the IRS adjusts yearly, and section 6166 lets part of the tax be paid in installments. State inheritance taxes are a separate layer; Nebraska, for example, taxes distant relatives and non-relatives at rates its extension service lays out. None of this replaces the yearly discipline of good records, which is where farm taxes made plain starts.
When the successor is not family
More and more farms have no family heir who wants the work. Nebraska's Jessica Groskopf, who has written a whole series on this, starts with one question: what do you want to happen to the business when you are gone? Sell everything and divide the proceeds? Keep the land in the family as landlords? Or see someone continue the operation rather than sell to the highest bidder? The third answer is the most complex path and, she says, incredibly rewarding when it is done well. The successor is usually already nearby: a long-time employee, the current tenant, or a young producer down the road. Hiring and keeping the right people, which we wrote about in finding and retaining farm employees and in fair pay for interns and apprentices, is often where a non-family succession quietly begins.
The legal structure is a lease first and a sale later. Groskopf's lease guidance names the clauses that protect both sides: a transfer clause so the lease survives if the land is retitled into a trust or LLC, a binding-on-heirs clause so the tenant is not evicted the week after the funeral, written amendments only, and a clear termination process so the heirs are not stuck with a poor operator. Add an option to buy or a right of first refusal and the successor can plan a life around the place.
Matching services exist for owners who do not have someone in mind. Nebraska Land Link pairs retiring landowners with beginning farmers through an application, an interview and extension staff who look for a fit in values and goals. American Farmland Trust's Farm Link Finder lists farm link programs around the country, and its Land Transfer Navigators, supported by USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service, are skilled professionals in AFT's regions who give farmers, ranchers and landowners direct assistance with succession and transfer planning. Several of these groups are in our organizations directory.
Federal programs reward the choice. Under the Conservation Reserve Program's Transition Incentives Program, a landowner whose CRP contract is ending and who sells or leases long-term to a beginning or veteran farmer who is not a family member receives two additional years of CRP rental payments at the contract rate, and the incoming farmer must follow a conservation plan and use sustainable grazing or cropping, which fits the regenerative operator well. An owner willing to finance the sale can use FSA's Land Contract Guarantee, capped at $500,000, to cover the seller's risk, and the buyer can bring FSA's Down Payment loan, which finances 45 percent of a purchase up to $300,150 against a 5 percent down payment, with the balance from a lender, a cooperative or the seller. We explained those loans in FSA Microloans and Beginning Farmer Loans. The fairness question behind them is the subject of Who Gets to Farm.
This week's list
Succession is a process, not a document, and it starts with small steps taken in order.
- Before Thursday, write the one-page inventory: assets, how they are titled, debts, a rough value. If you do nothing else this month, do this.
- At the gathering, ask one question and set one date. No decisions, no announcements.
- In December, book the professionals: an attorney who does farm transitions, your accountant, and, if the family has old wounds, a mediator. Ohio State's Farm Transition program runs a six-hour workshop every winter and a certified agricultural mediation program backed by USDA's Farm Service Agency; ask your extension office what your state offers, and our service providers directory lists several.
- In January, hold the meeting. Write down what you want in a perfect world before you worry about how. Then take the inventory and the wish list to the attorney and let the tools follow the goals.
- Put a review on the calendar every year. Marriages, births, deaths and land prices will change the plan, and a plan nobody has read in ten years is barely better than none.
Farms that last are run by people who think long term and stay consistent about the unglamorous work. A succession plan is the longest-term decision a farm ever makes. Start the conversation this weekend, gently, and finish it in the new year.