FOR FARMING FAMILIES

The kids aren't coming back to the farm. Can you give some and keep a link?

Picture a couple in eastern Victoria who have spent forty years on a mixed farm, with a bit of everything and a lot of fencing. They have three adult children, a nurse in the city, a bridge builder and a teacher overseas, and all three love the place.

None of them is coming back to farm it, though, and at Christmas the conversation always drifts the same way. What happens to the farm?

Two things at once

The couple want two things that seem to pull apart. They want the farm to have a future, with a farmer who cares about it the way they do and something going back to the district that raised their kids. And they want the family to keep a link, not the work, but the connection.

Selling would end the link, and handing it to the kids would hand them a farm none of them can run. Giving it all away feels like too much.

So the first conversation isn't with a solicitor. It's around the kitchen table at Christmas, where the children say what they actually want. They want a place to bring their own kids, a say in what happens to it, and no fight between them, ever, about who got what. That's the brief.

Step one: a sharefarmer

Cultivate Farms sit down with the couple and agree what a good farmer for this place looks like, and then they find one, an aspiring farmer who has run someone else's herd for years and is desperate for a go of their own.

The couple and the farmer sign a share farming agreement, so the couple keep the title and the house while the farmer brings the work. Cultivate Farms write the farm plan with the couple and report every year, and when the kids come home, one of them helps the farmer with marking. It feels right.

Step two: give part, keep part

There is a way to step back from the farm without selling it. After a few seasons, with their advisers' work done, their farm would move into the Cultivate Trust, which runs it on their behalf, with the right farmer on it. The house block would stay in their names.

Part of what they hold would go as a gift to a local charity that funds the district's school and health service. The rest the family would keep, to hold or leave to the children in the will, so each child gets something with choices attached instead of a paddock to argue over.

The house stays theirs, so the link stays too.

What it could feel like

The farmer on the farm, the farm whole, and the district better for it. The couple with their house and their garden, the kids with a place to bring their own kids at Christmas, and nobody having that drifting conversation again.

Could this be you?

If your children aren't coming back to farm, you don't have to choose between selling and giving it all away. You can give some, keep some and set the dial yourselves.

The full guide, The Farm That Keeps Giving, is free at cultivatefarms.com/resources.

You can build your own plan at cultivatefarms.com/plan.

This story is an illustration. It's drawn from situations we see often, and it isn't any one farmer or family. It's general information, not legal or tax advice.