Learning from Farmers: Farm Transitions and Succession in the Mid-2020s

View the project report

Commodities

Practices

• Education and Training: technical assistance
• Farm Business Management: farm succession
• Sustainable Communities: quality of life

The primary goal of this project is to better understand farm business exit and succession following several years of heightened stress, including the ongoing climate crisis. We will identify additional support needed by farmers who want to continue farming and those who want to exit and transfer to a farming successor. A secondary goal is to understand the implications of ground leases, often used by non-profit farmland owners to achieve twin goals of long-term farmland access and affordability while also allowing farmers to build equity. As the first generation of farmers using these leases begins to exit, we want to better understand the education and guidance that landowners and exiting and incoming farmers need to achieve successful transfers. 

CISA and project partners will achieve the first goal through interviews with 15 exiting farmers, with a focus on farmers who are not retirement age, non-family succession, and/or those who transitioned their farms to employees. Interviews will be designed to elicit information about the reasons for their farm exit decision and the successes and challenges experienced in transferring their land or business to another farmer. We will also ask farmers what additional services or policies could have helped them to remain at their farm business or to more easily or successfully transfer their land or business to another farmer. 

We will identify lessons learned from current ground lease transfers and negotiations and will create a plan for educating current ground leaseholders, non-profit landowners, and incoming farmers about these leases.  

This project seeks to understand farm success, farm exit, and farm succession factors in the current moment to inform recommendations for policy and technical support. This project will use farmer interviews to improve our understanding of farm business exits, farm successions, and the support farmers need to stay in farming and/or successfully transfer their land and/or business to another farmer. Specific objectives are: 

1. To understand farmers’ reasons for exiting their farm business in 2023-5, with a particular focus on those farmers who are not yet of retirement age, non-family succession, and/or those who successfully transitioned their farms to employees. 
2. To understand these farmers’ successes and challenges in transferring their land or business to another farmer. 
3. To understand farmers’ opinions about services, support, or policies that could allow them to remain in farming or make successful farm succession easier. 
4. To improve the joint understanding of Massachusetts agricultural service providers, community farms, and farmer ground lease-holders of the impacts of ground lease arrangements on farm succession.