Succession Planning: Two Goals Every Farm Family Should Set
October 16, 2026 | Operations | Ag Lending Group Team
Succession planning conversations tend to stall for the same reason across very different families: everyone's talking about "the plan" as if it's one decision, when it's actually two separate sets of goals getting tangled together. Separating them tends to unstick the conversation faster than anything else we've seen work.
Goal One: The Future of the Operation
This is about the farm itself — who's going to run it, how ownership transfers, whether one child who's been farming alongside you gets first right to the operation while off-farm siblings are treated fairly through other assets. It involves entity structure, whether a gradual transfer through gifting or a phased buy-in makes sense, and how the operation stays financially viable through the transition rather than getting saddled with debt the next generation can't service.
Goal Two: Your Own Retirement
This is a separate question, and it's the one families skip most often because it feels less urgent than deciding who gets the north eighty. What does retirement income actually look like once you're not drawing a farm salary? Is it rental income from land you retain, proceeds from a partial sale, Social Security plus savings? Farmers who've spent forty years reinvesting everything back into the operation sometimes reach the finish line with a valuable farm and very little separate retirement asset base — which puts pressure on the transition to fund both the next generation's operation and your own retirement at the same time.
Why Separating These Matters
When these two goals get treated as one conversation, families often end up with a plan that shortchanges one side or the other — either the next generation inherits crushing debt because mom and dad needed the sale proceeds to retire, or the parents' retirement is thinner than it should be because everything got transferred at a discount to keep the operation afloat. Naming both goals explicitly, separately, tends to produce a plan that actually serves both.
Where Financing Fits In
A lot of succession plans lean on some form of financing — a note between generations, a loan to buy out non-farming siblings' interest, or restructured debt that smooths the transition period. We've worked through these structures with families in the Southeast, the Corn Belt, and the Northern Plains, and the details always look a little different, but the underlying two-goals framework holds up everywhere.
If you're in the early stages of this conversation, or stuck in the middle of one that's stalled, we're glad to sit in on a planning conversation alongside your attorney or accountant. Financing structure is often the piece that turns a stuck plan into a workable one.