FOR RETIRING FARMERS AND THEIR FAMILIES
Not ready to leave the farm? You can stay, and still plan to give it
By Sam Marwood
Picture a woman on a wheatbelt farm in Western Australia who has lived in the same house for forty years. Her husband planted the shelter belts and she planted the garden, and since he's been gone the cropping has been done by a contractor. It's been fine, but fine isn't what either of them built the place for.
She isn't ready to leave and she doesn't want to. She also doesn't want the farm to become a problem for anyone after her.
The questions keeping her up
Can I stay in my house, who would farm it properly, and what happens to it when I'm gone? Her nephews have said, kindly, that they'd sell it. She knows they would and she doesn't blame them, but it isn't what she wants.
Step one: a sharefarmer, and she stays
Cultivate Farms sit down with her and agree what a good farmer for this place looks like, and then they find a farming family who've been cropping on other people's land and want country they can build on.
She and the farmer sign a share farming agreement, so she keeps the title, and the house and the garden are hers, written into the agreement. The family move into the second house down the track.
Cultivate Farms write the farm plan with her. The shelter belts stay, the creek line stays fenced, and the way her husband rotated the paddocks is written down, because it worked. At harvest she drives the chaser bin, which is in the agreement too as a role, and she wouldn't miss it.
Planning the gift
She doesn't want to give the farm while she's living in it. She wants to keep it, and know exactly where it goes after.
So with her solicitor and accountant she plans the gift in her will. There is a way to step back from the farm without selling it. The plan is for her farm to move into the Cultivate Trust, which runs it on her behalf, with the right farmer on it, and her gift to go to a charity she has already chosen, a named fund that supports young people in the district.
Her advisers walk her through how a gift in a will is treated, what happens with the house, and what happens if she ever needs care. It's all in writing now, and she sleeps better.
What it looks like now
The farming family's kids wave from the school bus, the farm is cropped well to her husband's plan, and she has her house, her garden and her harvest job. And she knows that one day the farm would keep going, with a family on it and her gift doing good in the district.
Could this be you?
You don't have to leave the farm to plan for what comes after. You can stay on, have a good farmer working it now, and settle the gift in your will.
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 person or family. It's general information, not legal or tax advice.