Farming Succession Planning

Farming Succession Planning

Safeguard Your Land, Legacy, and Loved Ones with Wakefield Lawyers.

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Your farm is more than just a business, it’s your livelihood, your family history, and your future. When the time comes to pass it on, doing so without a solid plan can lead to uncertainty, conflict, and financial risk. That’s where Wakefield Lawyers come in.

We help farming families design clear, legally sound succession strategies so your land stays productive and in trusted hands for the generations to come.

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What is Farm Succession Planning?

Farm succession planning is the strategic process of transitioning a farm’s control, ownership, and day-to-day management from one generation to the next.

This isn’t simply a matter of retirement, it’s about protecting your family’s wealth, ensuring a smooth handover, and maintaining harmony throughout the process. Without a plan, the farm’s future — and your family’s — can quickly become uncertain.

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Why Succession Planning Matters for Farming Families

A lot of farming families want to ensure that their family farm can stay within the family. Often there are family dynamics that can make this tricky. Perhaps you have multiple children, and one in particular has done a lot of work on the farm, and you want to preserve their ability to continue, but you also want to be fair amongst all of your children.

At Wakefield Lawyers, we work closely with families to create personalised, legally secure plans. In order to help guide you, we need to understand how your assets work. How do you own the farm? Do you have an entity to run the business? What are the value of the assets?

We take the time to understand what feels fair to you and your family, as well as your goals for the future. From there, we provide tailored legal guidance to help you achieve those goals. We also recognise the valuable role your accountant or financial adviser plays, and we’re happy to work collaboratively as part of your broader professional team.

Options that we could assist with include:

• A carefully drafted Will that can include specific gifts of the farm assets, and the farmland itself. You might leave some farm assets to a particular beneficiary, or other non-farm assets to other family members.
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• We could look at how your run the business. Perhaps succession planning could work better if you ran the business within a Company, that could allow you to transfer or sell shares in the business to a successor over time. To give clarity about when these share transfers or sales would occur, a Shareholder Agreement, could be put in place.
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• We can look at the ownership of your land titles. Perhaps succession would see you transfer titles, or even parts of titles, during your lifetime, rather than after your death. Again, accounting / financial advice is important. Our expert property team can handle these transactions, including family farm stamp duty exemption applications.