As the sun rises over a tree-lined pasture at Early Morning Harvest in Panora, Iowa, Earl Hafner is already well into his day.
The 79-year-old farmer spreads buckets of a white powder in the pasture where his cattle graze. About three dozen cows bound down the hill to gobble up the morning snack — a byproduct of the organic grains Hafner has grown on this farm for decades.
“It’s like candy to a cow,” he said. “I mean, they love it.”
His son Jeff Hafner now owns the farm and manages the day-to-day operations. But Earl still helps out. Jeff jokes that his father retired to an 8-hour day.
“I don't sleep well unless I work hard during the day,” Earl said.
Although he’s still up early to feed cattle and will get in the combine to harvest fields after that, Earl has gradually stepped back from managing the farm, allowing Jeff to take the lead. That change took years, and Earl much prefers it to the alternative.
“I just see so many other farms just get sold, highest bidder, and so there goes all the memories and your hard work,” he said. “If you do it right, the next generation will inherit something and hopefully they will see, if they manage it, it's a good asset to have.”
The farm transition the Hafners recently went through is one that many farm families delay or ignore. Because retiring from a career in agriculture doesn’t just mean parting with land and a business. It also means giving up an identity.
“We know there's conflict that's going to exist, so it paralyzes people with fear,” said Wesley Tucker with the University of Missouri Extension. “They are afraid to make a mistake and do something wrong, so instead, they choose to do nothing, and that's the worst thing that they can do.”
Tucker’s title is agriculture business specialist, but he said a more accurate title would be a “family dynamics specialist,” since his goals are to help families “work through these sensitive issues and have some of these hard conversations.”
Tucker provides workshops and one-on-one counseling to farmers handing off their business to the next generation — and he’s gotten more requests for help in recent years.
“Farm succession is a huge need in rural America, but it's a topic that a lot of people choose to ignore,” he said. “They don't want to deal with it, partially because no one wants to think about their upcoming demise. No one wants to think about death.”
But Tucker said when the farm succession process is done halfway, or not at all, it can mean losing the farm.
“That's a common thing that people will say, ‘Well, my kids get along pretty well. I think they'll work it out,’” Tucker said. “My advice whenever I hear that is, why don't you just go get the for sale sign now? Because that's probably what's going to happen.”
The need for a plan
The average age of farmers in the United States is 58, and they’re getting older. As those farmers retire or die, it’s expected that at least 50 million acres of farmland in the Midwest will change hands by the end of the decade — a land mass about the size of Nebraska.
As this historic transition is underway in rural America, farm organizations are putting extra emphasis on helping families through the process.
Tucker said both difficult economic times, like those row crop farmers are experiencing, and prosperous economic circumstances, like what many cattle ranchers are currently witnessing, can get families thinking about succession.
"The pandemic in 2020 changed a lot of people's perspective on how short life can be,” he said. “I even saw an uptick after 2020 of people realizing that, wait a minute, maybe I need to get my house in order because we're not guaranteed tomorrow."
Martha McFarland is the farmland transition manager at the nonprofit Practical Farmers of Iowa. She said nearly 40% of farmland in Iowa is owned by someone 75 years or older.
McFarland said when it comes to farm succession planning, a mistake a lot of people make is going to their lawyer as the first step, before having hard conversations as a family.
“If you were going to redo your kitchen, you wouldn't bring in a contractor and say, ‘Hey, what color should I paint my walls?’” McFarland said. “More than likely, as you bring in a contractor, you have the vision, you know what you want to do.”
She advises her clients to find that vision first — to start by thinking about the legacy they’d like to leave. That means setting goals for the family, the farm and the land long before they start the paperwork.
Succession planning is more than a financial process. It can take years of mentoring and planning to get an heir ready to take over.
“Succession planning starts when you give your kids their very first set of chores,” Tucker said.
He tells farm families to give the young generation more responsibility as they grow, teaching them management and leadership skills over time before they fully take the reins.
"I think that's what makes the senior generation so afraid. They view it as an all or nothing. They view it as, OK, today I'm the farmer and tomorrow you're the farmer,” Tucker said. “That's not the way it works, or not the way it should work.
“Are you preparing them to be your successor, or are you treating your kids like hired hands?”
Preparing the next generation of farmers is a pressing issue, said Wyatt Fraas, who works with new farmers at the Nebraska-based nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs.
“We're in the midst of the baby boom retirement surge among farmers, as well as every other occupation in the country,” Fraas said. “So we need new farmers to come in as replacements, as partners.”
The Center for Rural Affairs provides financial literacy and business planning resources for beginning farmers. As an organization focused on rural prosperity, the health of farms and the ability for small farms to continue on is central to Fraas’s work.
“Farms and ranches are often the economic engine for rural places,” he said.
Tied up in the land
At Kansas State University class is in session. The goal of the semester: write your way back home.
Ashlee Westerhold, director of the Office of Farm and Ranch Transition, teaches “Returning to the Farm” to juniors and seniors.
“We have students actually fill out financial statements and understand, what would my role be coming back?” Westerhold said. “Can I make money farming? How much money do I need to make to support my family? Is that possible?”
Farming is infamously a low-margin business. For farm kids wanting to return, they often need to pay their own way. Westerhold recommends her students explore whether they can help diversify the family farm business to bring in more income.
In addition to helping them write their ticket back, running an element of the farm is a way for young farmers to tiptoe into business management.
“A lot of people don't know the ins and outs of their family business, especially in farming and ranching, until they own it themselves,” she said. “That can be a really hard place when you haven't seen financials until you were 55 years old.”
Fraas in Nebraska emphasizes the importance of new farmers having sound business plans and skills. The older generation can’t afford to just hand the farm over. Their retirement is tied up in the assets of the business and the land.
That can present a huge challenge when a farmer reaches retirement age.
“Their savings or their income or their investment is tied up in the land and the facilities and the business,” Fraas said.
Selling the business and farmland to a successor can provide a farmer with retirement income. But, it can be a challenge for social and emotional reasons. Farmers often live on the land they farm, making it tough for the older generation to let go.
“You're asking a farmer whose whole identity is wrapped up in farming, not to be a farmer anymore. Like, how do we figure that out?” McFarland said. “How do we help someone feel like they are passing along that legacy, that they're passing along that vision for the land, that care for the land, in a way that they still, at the end of the day, feel like that they have a purpose as well?”
‘It’ll never be done’
As a young adult, Jeff Hafner left the farm, went to college and spent time in the military. When he came back home, his father encouraged him to make certain elements of the farm his own and taught him about the various aspects of the operation.
“I am blessed that he wanted to be a mentor more than (the) ‘not give it up type’ of an attitude,” Jeff Hafner said.
Over time, the Hafners put the farm’s assets, which include the equipment, the land and the various business entities, in Jeff’s name.
In 2011, the Hafners started Early Morning Harvest, their brand of organic products — including flour, grits and cornmeal — made from the grains cultivated on the farm. It was a new chapter for the business and an opportunity for Jeff to lead.
“You can't have two bosses,” Earl recalls telling Jeff at the time. “So I said I would help, but I did not want to be an owner.”
These days, Jeff manages all aspects of the farm: the on-site flour mill, the crops they grow, a greenhouse and the farm store. Earl provides support.
“He does whatever he wants to do and I put out fires,” Jeff said.
Both stress that regular and honest communication has been the key to their successful farm transfer — a need that continues to exist.
“Between him and I officially on the books, yeah, it's probably done. But between him and I personally, it'll never be done,” Jeff said.
Now, Jeff has begun planning for when it’s his turn to pass the baton. This year, demand for Early Morning Harvest products was so high that Jeff began sourcing additional grains from other organic farmers to make them. He said finding a way to sustain this new market will be his legacy.
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The Next Harvest: Seeking Solid Ground airs Wednesdays on KBIA and can be found at KBIA.org. The series is reported and produced by Jana Rose Schleis and Caspar Dowdy. The Next Harvest: Seeking Solid Ground is supported by the Pulitzer Center. |
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This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. |
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