Tim Hammond and Wade Berlinic of Hammond Realty joined Dan Aberhart to publicly launch the Ag Exits and Acquisitions Advisory Framework, a four-phase approach to farm transitions built for operations that have outgrown the traditional listing model. The conversation surfaced a striking finding from the live audience: tax exposure and family conflict tied as the top concerns among people thinking about a farm exit, while nearly a third of the room admitted they had no coordinated advisor team in place. What emerged was a case for treating a farm transition not as a real estate transaction but as the final and most consequential business decision of a career -- one that requires a defined, structured, disciplined process long before a sign goes in the ground.
The Prairie farmland market has changed in ways the traditional listing industry has not kept pace with. A quarter that traded at $300 an acre in 1967 now moves north of $5,000 to $15,000 in some areas. A 10-quarter farm that was worth $500,000 two decades ago may now carry a value of $5 million to $10 million. The advice infrastructure around those transactions has not scaled with the numbers. Tim Hammond and Wade Berlinic started Hammond Realty with a conviction that a $30 million event could not be managed with a sign at the end of the lane and a handshake at the elevator. In 2024, they moved a 15,000-acre operation in three months. The family's children did not know it was for sale until the family was ready to tell them. Neither did the staff. Neither did the neighbors.
The Ag Exits and Acquisitions Advisory Framework is their answer to the gap. Four phases: Define, Discover, Design, Deliver. Define locks the agreement and expectations before any marketing begins. Discover maps every asset -- land title structures, yield history, landlord relationships, equipment, grain -- and identifies the tax and structural questions that need to be resolved before the farm is positioned. Design produces a blueprint with options, including a draft purchase and sale agreement built around what the seller needs, before any buyer has been approached. Deliver is the market phase -- and it is the only phase the traditional listing model touches. Wade and Tim bring in the lawyer, the accountant, the lender, and the wealth advisor together, often for the first time. They described sitting with a pair of brothers and watching the stress leave the room after that first coordinated meeting. The advisors who are in the room frequently say afterward that they have never done it that way before and should have been doing it all along.
The live audience polls gave the conversation its sharpest moments. When asked what worries them most about a farm exit, tax exposure and family conflict tied at 33 percent each. Getting the right price was essentially an afterthought. Wade's response: the highest price after tax does not necessarily start with the highest price to begin with. Structure matters more than the number on the listing. On team coordination, only 19 percent of the room said all their advisors talk to each other. Thirty-one percent said: what team? Tim noted that roughly 20 percent of the people they sit with have done the hard work of building a coordinated plan. The rest range from partial to none. Ryan Hillstead from Core Wealth confirmed the pattern from the wealth advisor side: too many families arrive after the transaction is already done and ask to sort out the taxes. Harry Siemens closed with a dairy succession story from Grunthal, Manitoba, where a family had no plan when their father had his first heart attack. They built one after he recovered. When he passed from a second heart attack, the plan worked. Harry's words: had they not had it, it would have been a complete disaster.
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