December 22, 2025

Farm succession: Evolution or revolution?

By Elsa Condon
Nicolet National Bank

Evolution: a process of change over successive generations. Slow, gradual, and continuous.

Revolution: a sudden, radical, or complete change. Possibly dramatic and stressful.

Deciding to own the farm and deciding to retire from owning the farm are once-in-a-lifetime events. Sometimes they happen by sudden, radical, and complete changes. More often, family farms work through a process of change.

Before covering succession evolution thoughts at length, a few words on the sudden-event. Sudden-event preparation documents that exist as “estate planning” are important to everyone.

While it is true that many estate planning documents take an attorney, there are critical things that everyone can do in 30 minutes or less:

• Inform a trusted person where key documents, safe deposit box keys, and other things are.
• Make a list of property you own and debts, with a contact person and phone number for each.
• At the top, put the “call these 2 people first.” For example, a person who can help run payroll.

Back to our succession evolution conversation. How do relatives and colleagues build trusting relationships to run the farm day-to-day, together? After working with family farms and businesses, I can share a short list of cornerstones that may guide your farm’s evolution.

1. Personal goals – a few themes to consider:
   • What can’t you imagine life without?
   • What brings you joy?
   • What do you want most for your family and your farm partners?
2. Practically speaking, write down your farm duties:
   • Daily, weekly, monthly, annually
   • Why bother with this? It provides visibility and validation for what you do, the data for your strengths and gaps, time away coverage and disaster planning.
3. About compensation:
   • It is often more than the check. Asset ownership and appreciation (or depreciation) usually comes with debt responsibility in the form of personal guarantees.
   • If you weren’t farming anymore, what would you need to replace? Consider housing, vehicle, tools, UTV, cell phone, insurance, child care, etc.

Succession of ownership and management happens best when all parties listen with the goal of understanding personal perspectives and goals. Why? Building trust at this level is a process.

Key things to do when discussing succession planning include:

• Take meeting notes and reflect on them later.
• Say “I didn’t know that,” or “would you give me an example?”
• Schedule time — daily, weekly, monthly — to focus on your farm business matters. Talk about how much to share, and not share, from these meetings.
• For the quiet listeners and note takers, do speak up.

When it is action time, say what you will do, then, do it.

Intentionally, this outline is a very different “to do” list. It is different from a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats business and farm analysis. It is not financial analysis.

It is hard to choose where to “start” in farm and business succession. Hopefully this quick read helped you identify differences between estate conversations and succession conversations, and showed another way to start your farm’s next, or first, succession evolution action.

Elsa Condon is VP Ag Banking Officer at Nicolet National Bank, a Corporate Partner of Professional Dairy Producers^®. She can be reached at econdon@NicoletBank.com.