BlogRunning the place, updated
Almost nobody has a succession plan
Survey work on agricultural succession produces two figures that sit awkwardly together. According to that work, 87% of farmers plan for a family member to take over, yet only around 23% of family farms have a formal plan for it. Most owners intend to hand the business to someone in particular and have not written down how.
What the figures show
These numbers cover agriculture as a whole rather than nurseries, because no horticulture-only figures turned up. Much of the work comes from advisory firms that sell succession planning, so the figures are best read as direction rather than precision.
The average age of a US farmer was 58 in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, against a typical retirement age of around 64, and nearly four in ten operators expect to transfer ownership within ten years. By USDA-derived figures cited across the advisory literature, about 30% of family farms survive into the second generation and about 12% into the third. Set beside the 87% who intend to pass the business on, most of those intentions never come to anything.
Why plans stall
In a lot of nurseries the business lives in one person's head. Decisions about what to grow, what it is worth, which customers matter and when a block is really ready rest on thirty years of judgement written down nowhere. You can leave someone the land, but you cannot leave them that, and both sides usually know it.
Fairness can be harder to settle than ownership. If one child works in the business and two do not, an equal split is unfair to the one who stayed, and an unequal split means a conversation nobody wants at Christmas, so it gets put off. Land has often appreciated past what the operation earns, and a business that cannot be bought out of its own cash flow is hard to hand over. Nor is there a deadline, and advisers note that putting a plan in place takes years, so the time to start is well before it feels urgent.
Writing down what the owner knows
Most of succession is legal, financial and personal, and the part most often skipped is practical. If the business runs on one person's knowledge, the handover is a transfer of judgement, and that has to happen gradually while the person is still around to correct it. More of that knowledge can be recorded than most owners assume, from what is standing in each block to what each crop is worth and to whom, and which customers are worth keeping. When those live in a system, the business can be handed over. When they live in one head, the successor has to reconstruct them while also running the place.
One way to begin is to pick the decision only you can currently make and spend this winter making it with somebody else in the room, saying the reasoning out loud. Done once a season for five years, that transfers the part of the business that has no deed. Lawyers and accountants will handle the rest, but they cannot do this part.
Sprout will not write a will or value the land, but it can keep the practical knowledge somewhere other than one head. Every count, dump, move and sale is recorded against the lot with the date, who did it and their own words as the note, so the history of each block is there for whoever runs it next, and each customer sits on a price level that puts who pays what in writing. A family yard where one person knows everything gets that knowledge on record while that person is still there to correct it. A larger nursery gets the same from the three or four long-serving people who will not all retire in the same year.