Life on a Farm and the Ever After??

Living on a farm certainly presents some unique challenges at times. One of these is retirement and planning for it. I have been following the media lately about the upcoming budget. With the rumoured changes to the age pension eligibility to be hiked up to 70 years of age in 2029, I have calculated I will be in the group who will probably cop the phasing in of the new age requirements. We would probably not be eligible for it anyway. The question is what do we do with the farm? As part of the preparation for some big decisions ahead of us I have attended a Farm Succession Workshop with Isobel Knight from Proagtive  and she was extremely enlightening to workshop with. I have also listened to her DVD again and noted a few more things which I had forgotten about.
I have also done a free 4 week introductory unit with Open2study called Entrepeneurship and the Family Business which was quite good at explaining why only 30% of family businesses survive past 2 generations.
To see an example of that we have to look no further than ourselves where we were supposed to be part of a family business but in reality we weren't.My In laws wanted financial control to continue when they were no longer alive. My husband was promised a lot, experienced a lot, saw the goal posts continually shifted and encountered extremely poor communication skills coming from the older generation. He finally made a decision to leave when he realised the truth of what was happening.
 He has now become the entrepeneur and is quite good at it. Before that he was just an intrepeneur banging his head against the proverbial brick wall.
Succession planning is vitally important for farm families if there is someone wanting to take over the farm. I think farming families in Australia will struggle in the coming years if this issue, along with all the other profit eroding issues aren't addressed.
We are in the situation where we have a younger family member wanting to follow in our footsteps, and we certainly do not want them to suffer like we did.

On a different topic, the Sydney Royal Easter Show has finished and the woodchopping events finalised. Bryan once again placed second in the World Treefelling Championship on Good Friday, this year he was cheered on by Team Wagner.  They had an eventful day seeing the Royals whizz past in their car, and managed to do lots of touristy things in the few days they were in Sydney.