Colby, Kansas | Chief Illiniwek - 2/19/2026 14:07
3: sacrifice the joy of having multiple kids, but this allows you to give the whole farm to one child and keep the family farm whole
There’s no perfect solution, but I thought spelling it out to young guys now at least gets them thinking about what choices may need to be made later.
Wow, this is quite a thread. I really hope the OP is being facetious here. If not, that is really sad and if someone is seriously thinking through option 3, maybe they need to reevaluate their priorities in life, especially if they proclaim to be a Christian.
I suppose I have a different perspective because I'm basically already out (we could have another discussion about the assumptions many of you like to make regarding the "off-farm kids"), it's highly unlikely I will get back into farming of any significant scale, and therefore an almost zero chance that my kids will. We have a lot of kids by modern standards (5), but wouldn't trade it for anything, even if it means they all get very little inheritance. I plan to encourage them to be entrepreneurial if it's a fit for them and hopefully have enough resources scraped together to back them to the extent possible. It's unlikely I'm going to build anything special at this point in my life, maybe I can at least get into position to help them do it. I'd rather they get their "inheritance" when they are at the age to do something with it and maybe I can help advise.
So much of the drama in this thread could be solved if people treated things like a business. Agreements in writing up front, recognizing the actual value of contributed labor, keeping the operating entity separate from land ownership. If the heir who stays home to farm is treated as underpaid slave labor (although as someone else pointed out, the perks are often forgotten), then yes, they need compensated at the end, I don't think most people dispute that. There are two solutions, pay them a fair wage upfront, either in real wages or in equity, or have some other mechanism to at least make some effort to put a value on their contribution so that "fair" can actually be defined, e.g. growth on the business over time minus the return on assets/equity due the parents, then prorate the net based on contributed labor, or something along those lines. Or put the operating entity in an LLC and actually transfer some equity in lieu of cash wages. If fair can be defined and shown I think that alleviates much of the family battles and more importantly gives the parents confidence in their plan. But that takes people who are willing to have hard conversations and communicate. And for all the good traits that people in farming have, those too often are missing.
Edited by LHaag 2/20/2026 09:55
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To the young guys- inheritance