Who gets the farm? Family? Stranger?
Staff writer
Van Peters was where he wanted to be. It was just getting light on the prairie. Jimmy, his trusted quarter horse, was under his saddle. The future of his ranch was there with him.
“We were out there at sunup, horseback, gathering some cows and calves,” Peters said. “Never a better feeling than being on a horse, with my grandson, out in the Flint Hills.”
Many ranchers and farmers in Marion County don’t have a next generation to farm or ranch into the future.
The average age of producers in Marion County is 59, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2022 Census of Agriculture. More than a third are over 65. Only 9 % of Marion County farmers and ranchers are younger than 35.
Many sons, daughters, and grandchildren of aging ranchers are uninterested in taking over the family farm.
“There’s very few, very few young guys stepping in,” said Peters, 74, a Hillsboro rancher. “We’ve got a lot of neighbors around here that are in their 60s that have nobody coming back to take over the family farm. It’s sad. It’s very sad. And I don’t know how to change that.”
Within 10 to 15 years, two-thirds of farmers are going to be thinking about stopping their work, according to Ashlee Westerhold, a transition specialist at Kansas State University who works throughout the state to help aging farmers and ranchers plan their next step.
“My kids didn’t want anything to do with the farm,” said Maurice “Moose” Meirowsky, 89, who farmed on land passed down through generations in Peabody. “You couldn’t get my son anywhere near a tractor.”
His son and daughter “went into computers” and moved away, he said
“I love farming,” he said. “You’re your own boss. You are out in the open. Nobody tells you what to do. It’s a good life.”
He insisted his children’s decisions didn’t bother him.
“Everybody’s got to have their own destiny,” he said.
But they sapped his motivation.
“When it was clear my son wasn’t going into it, there was no object for me,” he recalled, so he sold his equipment and leased his land.
Older generations often felt an obligation to keep the farm running.
“It’s the only place I was really comfortable, I guess,” said Warren Windsor, now 89, of Peabody. “I grew up there with my dad. There were bad years. Man, those ’50s were drier than heck. But it never even entered my mind about quitting. It just wasn’t an option.
“My wife felt the same way. Without her, I don’t know what I’d have done. She was always encouraging me. She said, ‘I know we can do it.’”
Windsor’s son took over from him. His granddaughter helps farm the land.
“It was easy for me to give it up because I knew it was going to be in good hands,” Windsor said.
Westerhold thinks that the pressure on younger generations to take over family farms has become less than it was in the past.
“I am seeing a shift in kind of parenting,” she said. “People who have kids in their 30s now are like, ‘I’m happy that they have a job. I’m happy that they’re finding what they want to do,’ and are more supportive.”
“Farm life is very hard,” Amy Summervill, mother of Shelby Summervill, 16, said of her daughter’s intent to be a physical therapist. “I want her to make the decision.”
Westerhold wouldn’t be surprised.
“I think some farmers knew their children, at a very young age, were never going to be interested,” she said. “They just knew that it would not be the life for that child. And they were able to kind of mourn that, or grieve that, throughout their life. So it wasn’t a shock to them.”
Westerhold deals with complex emotions as she consults each year with 80 to 100 farm and ranch families looking at retirement.
Some who have no one to take over their operations just sell out completely. Others sell their equipment and stop farming but keep the land to lease.
Some are interested in the idea of gradually transferring their working operations to someone not in the family, Westerhold said. In the past year and a half, she has worked with about 20 farm and ranch families who are exploring a transition to “non-related parties.”
She is working with two farming families in Marion County considering that. Neither is ready to talk about it publicly yet.
“I think a lot of our rural Kansas operators really want folks in their community to be the ones that take over their farm,” she said. “And they want to see their rural town stay vibrant, bringing young people back.”
Arrangements can be complicated and tricky, she said. They must weigh the farmer’s desire to guarantee a retirement income for his family and pass along some inheritance against a new farmer’s attempt to get into the business without much money.
“There’s this huge dichotomy,” she said, “between these farmers who have reinvested every penny that they’ve made back into a farm and now have grown their business into multimillion-dollar operations, and the beginning farmers, who might not have much to their net worth.
“It has to be that balancing act of what do you value? If you wanted the highest return on investment and you sold your ground to the neighbor, then that might be your best way of recuperating all your equity out of the business.
“But if you have built this operation for another person to support their family and support your local economy, then we have to look at it in a different way.”
Marion County is in an advantageous position for flexible arrangements, she said.
The county has 477 “new and beginning farmers,” an unusually high number, she said.
Some are trying to get into farming for the first time. Others are middle-aged offspring of older farmers who only now are getting into the business.
Much of the county is within commuting distance of McPherson and Newton, where spouses or even farmers can find off-farm jobs to bring in extra money as they are starting.
Westerhold’s office, a part of the university’s Office of Farm and Ranch Transition at the Department of Agricultural Economics, runs a “land-link” program to match farmers with non-relatives.
In many cases, however, farmers already know people outside their family to whom they might want to transfer their operations.
One family she is working with is thinking about transferring their farm to a young neighbor who worked for them as a youth.
“He really enjoyed the work and wants to be more involved, wants to stay in the area, wants a life in agriculture, and he has a passion for it,” she said. “To farm in today’s conditions, with the market pressures, with climate, with everything that is going on in our agricultural sector, if you don’t love it, you cannot do it. You have to have that passion.”