By TESA NAUMAN
Tennessee Correspondent

BURNS, Tenn. — Who will inherit the family farm is sometimes a topic never discussed, or a topic that can rip families apart when it does come up, according to Dr. Ron Hanson of the University of Nebraska.

Why is the topic so potentially volatile? Because it can bring out jealousy between siblings and expose controlling parents, he said.
Hanson, who serves as the Neal Harlan Professor of Agribusiness in the Department of Agricultural Economics at UN, spoke about the subject at the Tennessee Farmland Legacy Conference held Oct. 9-10 outside Nashville, at Montgomery Bell State Park. The conference had presentations on several topics relating to farm ownership, including farm estate planning.

“There is nothing closer to my heart and there’s nothing I have a greater passion for than farm families,” said Hanson, who was raised on his family’s farm in Henry County, Ill. When he was 16, his family lost their farm and his family fell apart.

“I never want families to endure the pain, the tears, the sorrow and the emptiness and regret that I went through,” he said, giving many examples of dysfunctional families and the ways their lack of communication can cause problems.

Once, a young man who was about to graduate the next day from UN came to Hanson’s office, crying and begging for Hanson to fail him so he couldn’t graduate. When asked why he’d want such a thing, the young man said if he graduated, it meant he’d have to return to the family farm and work for his father – something he didn’t want to do.

He’d finished top in his class, majoring in business, and a major company had offered him an extremely lucrative job. Despite that, the young man had turned down the job offer because he knew he couldn’t disappoint his father. So, instead of telling his father that he was going to spend his life working in a field he loved, he went to work in the fields with his father.

Another man had been told by his parents that if he moved back home and worked on the family farm, it would be his after his father died. Nineteen years later, the man’s mother died and his father remarried. The man had been working on the farm, making the same wage he did when he began 19 years earlier – the only thing the man owned outright was an old pickup truck.

Late one Christmas night, the man answered a knock on his door. It was his father, who told him that this new wife didn’t like having him there and that he would have to leave by the end of the week. When his son asked how his father could do this, and reminded him that the farm was supposed to be his after the old man died, the father informed his son that he would give the farm instead to his new wife.

In order to avoid potential problems, Hanson recommends having families discuss in stages what the parents plan to do with the farm after they’ve died.

“When you have this family talk, the parents with the children, it comes in stages. Early in life, when the children are of a young age, all they need to know is that if something ever happens to (the parents), here’s how they’ll be taken care of,” he explained.
After the children have grown and reached a point of maturity, a more detailed discussion about the farm should be had by family members, including any in-laws who are considered a part of the family, Hanson said.

“As the children get older, go through college and marry, then you start to talk about the farm and the estate,” he said. “I’m not saying you read the will, line by line, word for word, for those children. All I’m saying is that those children should basically know what the parents’ wishes are, what the parents’ vision is, and how the parents’ wishes are to be carried out so there are no surprises.”
Hanson said it’s important that the first meeting be with the children, and have a follow-up meeting with any in-laws.

“The in-laws are part of the family, so treat them as a part of the family,” he said. “You’ve got to have a family environment to talk about this.

“It’s an open and honest environment. So, if someone’s mad or upset, we can talk about it.”

Some families use a third party to act as a referee when the discussion becomes heated.

“Bringing in a third party ... is helpful, because a third party can keep the family on focus: ‘Here’s what we need to accomplish, discuss and make sure we all need to agree upon,’“ he said.
“I’ve seen some families where the parents really can’t do it and they need that third party in there to do it; other families, (a third party) is not necessary. It’s about parents and their wishes and how well they have this planned out.”