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Working for free
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bandrcattle
Posted 1/9/2019 08:59 (#7231714 - in reply to #7227611)
Subject: RE: Working for free


south west ohio
My situation is similar to yours except I’m the father in the picture. Let me share my experience and advice. We farm about 700 acers and currently have 50 cows. I had to start over myself as a farmer because family farm was sold when I was young. Now 20 years later my son(24 years old)has been farming with me. He did not have an off farm job but still lives at home so his expenses are minimal. He has been working for “free”. We didn’t always see eye to eye on stuff as I’m apparently hard to work with or talk to like your father. I kept telling him its all going to be “yours one day” and you get room and board. Now here is where the problem is... i had plans of basically turning everything over to him in 5 years. I have made a lot of new equipment purchases to put him in a good spot when he took over. With these purchase there really was no extra money to pay him. Stuff that i really didn’t need today but nice newer equipment that he would get debt free so hopefully he would not struggle and could expand the farm since he had no debt load. In my mind we were both working for the same goal. But apparently in his mind he was working “free” for an asshole that was hard to get along with and basically its my way or the highway.

My son didn’t like they cattle and wanted to get rid of them. But while we usually only had around 50-60 pairs and it wasn’t a lot of profit for the amount of labor it was profit and a way to make some ground make money that was not farmable and we would have to bushog.

Now this fall in the middle of harvest we had the big blow up that i think a lot of people on here are saying you need to have. And he left and hasn’t been back. So now here I’m trying to figure out what to do as i cant take care of all of this stuff by myself ( I also have another full time job i needed to be able to get this debt paid down and was my “retirement job” after he took over.

So i guess what I’m trying to say is just sit down with your dad and make sure your calm in sensibale before you make any decisions as my son did. His choice to leave and my stupidity for letting it get to that did not do either of us any good. It’s an unfortunate situation we are now in because of a lack of true communication. Everyone says I’m hard to talk to but i sure wish i was forced to listen to his side. I might not of liked what he had to say nor agreed with it but i hope that after thinking about it for a few days I would of got things changed so we could be working towards common goals. Hopefully your father is like me and really wants to see you succeed as a farmer he just needs a little help getting pointed in the right direction.



Edited by bandrcattle 1/9/2019 09:06
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