Knowledge Center Blog

Last month I made a bunch of sarcastic (and not so sarcastic) comments to get you thinking about your future and your family’s future.  Hopefully you’ve started thinking that transition planning might be worth the effort.  A little bit of planning might help preserve your family farm or business, and more importantly, it might keep your family together.  So what’s the next step?
 

Did you know that February is National Canned Food Month?  Talk about good timing!  We all know that eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is an important part of a balanced, healthy diet, but access to some of your favorite fresh fruits and vegetables can be seriously limited this time of year, right?  Enter canned foods! 

Welcome to February!  With Valentine's Day right around the corner (if you had forgotten, consider this your reminder that you may want to pick up a present for that special someone in your life...) we wanted to share some of the things that we "love" about farm life and rural living.  Enjoy!

10.          A little slower pace of life.

In our area (Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland) farmers often talk about the amount of land that they own in acres...50 acres, 100 acres, 1000 acres.  (Fun fact: as you move towards the central and western part of the country, land is sometimes measure in hectares, which is approximately 2.47 acres).  But what does an acre of land look like?  And what can it produce?

I speak to a lot of groups about a lot of topics.  These days the most common topic that agricultural groups ask me to address is transition planning – how can/should they bring the next generation into the farm business?  Transition planning is a process for determining how to transfer ownership of assets and management responsibilities to the next generation.  It’s one of those topics that most families know is crucial for the future of the family, but they just never get around to doing it.  I don’t need to remind you of the reasons why, but I will.