Jonathon Small, a farm management consultant with Global Ag Risk Solutions and a 35 year career in agricultural economics, joins the show live from AgSmart 2019 to talk about why succession plans built on good intentions still fall apart. He walks through the pattern he's seen repeatedly, parents wanting to treat every child equally becoming the exact source of conflict that splits a farm and a family. The tension is that succession planning gets treated as a paperwork problem when it's actually a communication problem, one most farm families avoid until it's forced. Producers walk away with a clearer sense of what the conversation actually requires, and why waiting rarely makes it easier.
Recorded live at AgSmart 2019, this conversation draws on 35 years of farm management consulting with someone who has watched almost every kind of succession plan unfold, and fall apart. Jonathon Small, a farm management consultant with Global Ag Risk Solutions, argues that the plans that fail rarely fail on paper. They fail because the conversation never happened.
What's Inside
- Why "treat every kid equally" is often the exact decision that tears a farm family apart
- The real difference between a business plan and the communication work succession actually requires
- How he originated the idea behind production cost insurance, later built into Global Ag Risk Solutions' products
- Why benchmarking against other producers is one of the most underused tools in farm management
- What changes when a producer can finally see where they actually stand against their peers
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