Andy Junkin returns to talk about the book he wrote and the experience behind it. A seventh generation farm boy whose own succession fell apart, he traces how the grit that carried a family through seven generations on hard ground became the thing that broke it, and what he has learned since about why farm transitions fail. His argument is that estate planning is the last step, not the first, and that the work before it is character: five principles on a sign, a year of each partner changing one habit, and monthly meetings where ideas are capped small enough that nobody feels attacked. He is direct about his own part in the conflict, and about how few farms reach a third generation.
Andy Junkin is a seventh generation farm boy from Bobcaygeon, Ontario, and he did not inherit the farm. He came home from Guelph with a two hundred page business plan, watched his father put it in the fire, and spent the next decade trying to hold a family together that was coming apart around the operation. He has not been back.
What he built instead is a practice that has helped save family farms across twenty two states and five provinces, and it starts somewhere most succession advice does not. Before the estate planning, before the lawyers, there is a sign in a milk house with five principles on it, and a year of everyone agreeing to change one thing about themselves.
What's Inside
- The five principles on the milk house sign, and why he thinks they have to be in place before anyone opens an estate plan
- Why he studies narcissism, and his argument that successful operators are more exposed to it than most people
- The twelve month character improvement cycle, and what he means by wanting 4-H for adults
- The two brothers, the ten million dollar farm, and the five percent flaw on each side that nearly ended it
- Why he caps every idea brought to a family meeting at a fixed dollar figure, and what that does to a father who resists change
- What separates transferring assets, which he says only requires dying, from transferring judgment, which takes ten years
Connect with Andy:
Website: https://stubborn.farm
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caygeon
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stubborn_farm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stubborn.farm/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@StubbornFarm
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