General News
13 March, 2026
Succeeding at succession planning
SAYING succession planning for farms is a complex subject is a little bit like saying water is wet – the variables are obviously as vast as the acreages, types of land, range of weather, and the family histories associated with them, be they regard for ancestry or a new generation ready to make their mark.
With four generations of Victorian farming in her own history and 35 years experience in research, agronomy, commercial farm management, and strategic advisory, Dr Kate Burke said she has seen enough of the good – and unfortunately bad – with the subject to be inspired to write something that gets deeper to the heart of the matter, as she believes usually there is much more going on below the surface.
Her new book, Succession, is her second and was somewhat of a natural sequel to her first.
“I wrote a book called Crops, People, Money And You – The Art Of Excellent Farming (and Better Returns) back in 2020,” Kate said.
“The premise of that ... and I still see it – because farming is so complex – what we think is driving our profits and our performance and our general happiness isn't necessarily exactly what's going on.
“In the sort of 20-odd years prior to writing that book that I'd been following the journey of farmers and trying to work out why some are just good at it – really good at it – and seem to do really well, and also seem to lead pretty meaningful lives. What were they doing that others might not have been doing?
“From a lot of formal type research studies plus other work that I collected, the common themes were – they were really good at production, hence the word ‘crops’ – (it) could be sheep, it could be anything ... in terms of producing stuff per millimetre of water, they were technically, very good. They were good at managing themselves and others.
“So, good with people, and they're good with money. They had a profit focus, but they knew when to spend their money and what to spend it on. So they didn't waste it, but they didn't hoard it either.
“The reality is, the ones that do that, that get that magic combination of being able to be good at all of those things, they are roughly making twice as much money compared to the average farmer, so it's a pretty big gap.”
So, as she delved deeper into the human side of well-run, profitable farming, the topic of succession planning kept coming up in her work.
Her approach led her to look beyond the formal legal and economic categories, important as they are.
“The legal stuff is really just a tool,” Kate said.
“The legal stuff is just like a header. It's a machine we need to use to get a job done, whereas the actual job we're trying to do is to work out how to transition the farm so that, at the end of the day, everyone can have enough to live on.
“If the main game is to keep the family farm in the family ... the business needs to be viable, but the mechanics of it are purely just tools.
“But the end game is to be able to have feet under the table at Christmas and not have any awkward stuff.”
Kate said that even when farmers have been proactive in preparing for an eventual handover, when the time comes, the dynamics change; the human side cannot be ignored.
“Often what I see, the focus is purely on the figures, and the legal people say, ‘Yep, we've done succession, and we've got these trusts, and we've got this, we've got that’, and then I get a call 20 years later to say, well, we've got all these processes, but we're not sure how to pull the trigger, because this person's fighting with this person and so on,” she said.
She said she had identified multiple categories that need to be part of discussions early and ongoing.
“I talk about knowing what you want, knowing what everyone wants, knowing how everyone functions together, knowing who's attached to the place,” Kate said.
“Often, we don't include the off-farm kids in the conversations, and so the farming parents go to the solicitors, and it might be the next-generation farming person involved in those conversations, but the perspective from outside, from the other members of the family, never gets heard.
“And that's often where the trouble starts, and all is needed is to hear everyone's voices, and a lot of the trouble down the road can be avoided.”
Asked why the book has a heavy emphasis on the familial and social components, she said of the “traditional methods … it’s clearly not working” with “less than 10 per cent of Australian family farms have a written and legally binding succession plan”
On the other end, there were “seven out of 10 are those that either haven't started it at all or have a work in progress but haven't completed it.”
“We've just got to try a different approach,” Kate said.
“That means everyone is elevating the people up the list and becoming comfortable talking about the emotional issues.”
She said it was also important that service providers recognised their own limitations.
“If they don't have the skills in-house to cover the emotional side of things, they are prepared to work collaboratively with other providers that do have those skills, because we can't ignore emotion in a topic like this.”
Kate said it was far too common for this topic to get “pushed down the road”.
“This is really hard,” she said.
“Hard because it involves humans. No one wants to pick one child over the others, even though that's exactly what's happened by stealth. (Also) no one wants to talk about the fact that their usefulness could be coming to an end.
“I certainly don't want to talk about that, and it's not our natural skill set.”
She said her consulting had brought her to see how “human side still made it a pretty messy process” and she wanted to see if it was possible to “create a bit of a structure around things to tick off before we start getting into the nitty gritty”.
Kate’s books can be found online at thinkagri.com.au.