Ag Generational Change

Ag Generational Change

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
I talked with agricultural real estate attorney Kim Maloney about turning the farms over to kids. "One of the things that I think is interesting in farming's questions about generational change. If you look at USDA data, the average age of a farmer now is 58. There have been a lot of challenges in farming with trying to transition from the older generation to the new. It starts with the question whether or not young people want to farm. The question is, are there diminishing family farms? Does somebody want to sell to the developer because they want to retire and their kid doesn't want to take over the farm and run it. And then the question becomes, if they do want to take over the farm, how do you get that transition working. There are a lot of things that farmers will need to consider. You've got transition operations, you may have to transition real property if you do own the property and don't lease it and all of that has implications for gifting and taxes. It has been a challenge that people are looking at all over the country. One of the challenges that young farmers have raised is a lack of ability to get land and the government has taken a look at their CRP program. They have made some changes to that in order to allow people to have some early termination rights and CRP contracts if you have a new farmer that is getting into the business to try and help some of these young people get in."
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