Ducks on the Pond
A podcast for rural women... by rural women. Hosted by Kirsten Diprose and Jackie Elliott, they seek expert advice and the stories of other rural women on issues such as succession planning, motherhood, starting a business...running for politics and much more!
Ducks on the Pond
The Hidden Economics of Farm Life: Succession, business and drought.
Farm life can sometimes be romanticized, with the wide open spaces, animals and the freedom to do what you want. You might love the bush and your community…but are you actually happy?
There are many factors that influence our wellbeing. This includes how well the business is running financially, farm succession (including whether it has been worked out or not) and your experiences of drought and natural disaster (including how many times you’ve been impacted). Then of course, all of these factors intersect. So, that’s why we’re looking at these issues altogether.
Hear from:
*Alice Byrnes - Family lawyer and Co-Director at Cheney Suthers Lawyers. She shares her own personal experience of growing up, when her grandparents died unexpectedly, without a clear plan for what would happen to the farm.
*Prof. Jacki Schermer - lead researcher on the Regional Wellbeing Survey team at the University of Canberra. Her research has found that happiness in rural areas has gone down recently.
There are big and sometimes difficult conversations that need to be had when working with family on the farm.
This episode will remind you why it’s so important to have them… and have them often enough to keep up with the inevitable changes and unpredictable events that come with life on the land.
Resources:
- From Crisis to Clarity Report: Proactive and Collaborative Farm Succession - Cheney Suthers Lawyers
- The Regional Wellbeing 2025 survey is open to responses now!
Interested in sponsoring the NEXT season of Ducks on the Pond? Let us know! Email: kirsten@ruralpodcastingco.com
49% of women are contributing to farming community value, but only 10% of family farms are being succeeded by daughters.
Speaker 2:I think in the last 25 years we've seen change. Women are now proudly calling themselves farmers.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to Ducks on the Pond, brought to you by the Rural Podcasting Co, kirsten Dipros, here with you. This season is being sponsored by Buy CC Fine Jewellery and it's the last episode in our season and we are doing the draw this episode for the winner of the Piper Gold Ring. Very exciting, so keep listening in for that. Now, when we think about farm life it can be romanticized with the love of animals and trees and space. But so much more than that influences whether we're actually happy. This includes how well the business is running financially, the impacts of bushfires, drought, floods and what succession plans are in place, and also just our connection to community. So in this episode we're looking at all of those factors together.
Speaker 3:Firstly you'll meet Alice Burns, family lawyer and co-director at Cheney Southers Lawyers, whose own family experience of losing both her grandparents suddenly when she was a kid, back when her family really didn't have a formal written succession plan in place for the family farm, has given her a deep understanding of the importance of wills and about having those big conversations around farm succession planning. You'll also hear from Professor Jackie Shermer from the University of Canberra. She runs the Regional Wellbeing Survey and is really broadening the notion of well-being. She calls it leading the good life. Broadening the notion of well-being she calls it leading the good life, and her research has found that happiness in rural areas has actually gone down slightly in recent times. But first let's meet Alice Burns, who runs a legal practice but still has her heart in agriculture.
Speaker 1:I am a very proud rural woman. I grew up on a farm south of Orange, in Springside, where my dad was a fifth-generation farmer. It started out as a dairy farm and then my dad and my grandfather Ken they moved into horticulture and they created a very large scale apple orchard production.
Speaker 3:Ah lovely, are you still farming now? In any way, I would call it small scale farming.
Speaker 1:So my husband and I, he's got his own business as well and we're on a small patch of land just outside of Orange in a place called Nashdale and we're just pivoting from cropping to small scale livestock, so very busy at the moment. We've got three children, two businesses and, yes, life is full on. How old are the kids? Four, seven and eight, oh great.
Speaker 3:So you're also a lawyer, that's your main job would you say so.
Speaker 1:you're also a lawyer. That's your main job? Would you say that is my main job? Yes, I'm an accredited specialist in family law and I work closely with families and businesses, navigating legal matters, especially those unique to rural life, such as farm succession, estates, family law disputes and property ownership.
Speaker 3:How important is it, do you think? Think to have an understanding of farming and rural life when it comes to property law for farmers, because it's a lot more than like buying a house with your partner. It's so many layers.
Speaker 1:Yes, I grew up in a multi-generational farming life as a kid, where we lived on one side of the farm and my grandparents were on the other, and what was very important and what that made work was not only did my grandmother, who was a trailblazer back in the day, she was a pharmacist, so she had that off farm income, as well as my mum, who is a very well-known garden designer. Even as a child I knew that old adage of asset rich, cash poor. And particularly with farming, we have those economic downturns that are becoming more and more regular with climate change, so there were times when mums of farm income were putting food on the table. So from a legal perspective, it's very important to understand not only the business operational structures but also whoever owns those legal entities might not necessarily be the same as who owns the property.
Speaker 3:And how important is it for you to have the right lawyer, but also the right sort of legal arrangement? I think it can be really tricky, particularly if you're the person coming into a family farming situation, to know, firstly, what you should know about property law, what to expect, what to ask for, and then should you have your own lawyer, even that's a really good.
Speaker 1:that's a really good question and particularly for rural women, leadership doesn't always look like a title, particularly the daughters and daughters-in-law that are coming onto the file. So our firm, we've just published this fantastic report which is free, and we've got an eight step action plan for people who are starting that conversation. And it's perfect for daughters and daughters-in-law to read this report and the action steps to take and start navigating those conversations early. But at the very outset of succession discussions, while we don't necessarily say you need a lawyer straight away, it is very important to understand who actually owns what. It's quite interesting A lot of people come in and they say I want to transfer XYZ to XSUN, but they don't actually own that property, even generational. It's quite amazing how people might not necessarily understand the legal ownership of the farm. So I wouldn't necessarily say you need a lawyer from the outset of those discussions, but it's very important to understand the actual legal ownership of title of a business, of a legal entity such as a company, a partnership, I think trusts are often used in farming.
Speaker 3:What does it mean if you're not in the trust? Say it's your partner and perhaps their family. If you're not in the trust, what does that mean for you?
Speaker 1:It means that you're not a beneficiary of whatever the income or the capital that is held by that trust. So it means that you can't make decisions, you can't control and you can't receive anything or benefit from anything that is owned by that trust. So that becomes quite interesting in my family law disputes where the next spouse may not have understood that the farm was held in whatever type of entity. But if it was in a trust, it's very hard to attack that trust. If you're acting for the next spouse, however, the court would look at who is actually controlling it. So if the on-farm spouse is using that trust and is receiving an income or capital, the court may be inclined to pour that trust into the family law dispute, which will make it very expensive but academically interesting.
Speaker 3:What are some of the other ways that land or farm might be held?
Speaker 1:So we've got just in sole names as your legal person. We've got partnerships, we've got companies. We've got lots of different trust structures. You may have a unit trust, where several different people or partnerships own units in that trust, and there's discretionary trusts or there's hybrid trusts as well, but it comes back to what type of legal advice you're getting, as well as the most important tax and accounting advice, and there has to be a very clear financial purpose as well as legal purpose as to why you'd set a farming enterprise up in that way.
Speaker 3:I think for a lot of women, particularly if they've entered farming, their role on the farm. It changes often over time. Perhaps it's not a big one when you start out. Then kids arrive and grow up. Then perhaps you might become more involved. It's not a static document, is it when it comes to farm succession.
Speaker 1:No, it's not, but the main document that you want to achieve at the end, when you've got all the stakeholders involved, so you've got on-farm children, off-farm children, daughters, daughters-in-law, even the next generation, they might be involved as well. The document that you want to be achieving at the end is called a deed of family arrangement, and that sets out the terms and the timeline, and the timeline we're talking about could be 5, 10, 15 years and, most importantly, attached to this document are the wills of the mum and dad or the parents that are coming on or off the farm, so that everyone has a clear visibility and there's transparency as to what the arrangement is. But also it's linking that piece into the state and inheritance.
Speaker 3:Let's look at it from the opposite way. Say, you are the one who's been working on the farm and your parents have the farm and you've got a partner coming in. Yes, some of the things that you should be thinking about.
Speaker 1:So you will be starting to think about, particularly if you're going to have children. You'll be thinking about what is our family's future? Is our family going to remain on this farm? Is it going to be transferred into our names at some point? Where do you see your future income coming from, and what type of personal investment, emotional investment as well as legal investment are you going to be making into a property that's not necessarily in your names Down the line? You need to be starting to have those early conversations, which are very tricky.
Speaker 1:We are seeing in our farm succession practice here at Cheney Southers is that women and daughters-in-law are starting to be. There's definitely a shift away from that historic the favoured son is always the heir of the family farm. That is very slowly moving, even despite the statistics is that 49% of women are the ones that are contributing to total farming community value, but only 10% of family farms are succeeded by daughters. So that gap is very slowly closing, but not without resistance. And women also play that very critical role in farm resilience. For example, 37% of rural women volunteer in farm communities. They're strengthening local networks, and that's compared to only 23% of urban women in those urban areas. Yes, women are still unrepresented in these succession conversations, but daughters and daughters-in-law we've seen, who raise these topics rightly so are often seen as pushy or self-interested, when really they're just advocating for clarity, fairness and family security.
Speaker 3:How can a daughter-in-law raise some of these conversations, do you think? If they just want to know what the setup is, where's the property held, who's got control as directors, all that sort of stuff, Yep, Can they find that out? If potentially a family member is not I don't know willingly giving that information to them.
Speaker 1:At that point. So again we've got tips and tricks in our report, in our eight-step action plan. We've got a format for some of these family meetings and some conversation starters or suggested family meeting topics. However, if you find that you can't get that information freely, then you could engage a property lawyer to do those searches for you. So it would be getting a disbursement cost and doing those searches on the land registry services or ASIC to finding out who actually owns those entities, shareholdings, as well as who's got the title of XYZ in whose name.
Speaker 3:So this report that you did, which is a really interesting and excellent piece of work, thank you. Why was it something that was important for you as lawyers to do?
Speaker 1:Yes. So we in farms we've seen very good farm succession plans that have worked out beautifully and, most importantly, the family's still intact and those relationships are still intact. Most importantly, the family is still intact and those relationships are still intact. Also, we've seen it at the worst end of the scenario. I can talk personally with mine Again, going back to mum and dad living on the family farm. For years dad was just working on the farm that was in grandma and grandpa's names. Grandpa and dad went into business together. They were early adopters in technology and brought all this really cool agricultural innovation to Australia.
Speaker 1:In the 1980s. There was no succession plan, so we were living on this farm and there was no succession plan, and then on our family holiday, grandma and grandpa were tragically killed. So mum and dad are on this farm. There's huge amounts of debt and, most tragically and this is in hindsight, as a family lawyer and estate litigator, looking, how did your grandparents die? Car crash on our family holiday on new year's day, all forms yes, it was horrendous. So I was eight years. I can still remember that day very clearly Early 60s, too young, way too young, anyway.
Speaker 1:So the point was that Grandma and Grandpa's wills were very different. So then, at a very tragic time, my father and my most beautiful aunts who I absolutely adore and they're my role models had to negotiate with each other a very tricky legal situation. And you know, I tell this to everyone If you have an asset, if you're married, if you have kids, you need a will. It's the one piece of home administration you need to do. You need to do it today. If you do not have a will, your estate is going to end up in court regardless, because it has to be run through the administration of the court, because it's called intestacy, and then it's governed by legislation rather than what your wishes may have been.
Speaker 3:I suppose, back to the succession dynamics and the importance of back to the succession dynamics and the importance of, yes, having a will but also having those conversations about how the business will continue in the family. If that's what you want it to do, that's right yeah, so having again in our action plan.
Speaker 1:I'll just go through the steps, because this is answering your question. So the first step is going back to your first question about what do you need to understand. So, while this part is actually aimed at the retiring parents or the landowners, but it's also understanding what are the debts and liabilities, who owns what, what are the business structures, what are the tax implications. And then the next step, so step two, is setting up and preparing for that family conversation. So start reflecting for and this is particularly for daughters-in-law people that are coming or spouses that are coming onto the farm what are your core values and what are your goals in life? Do you see yourself actually being on the farm in the operations? What does that look like? Where are you going to keep your off-farm career going? And so how are you going to manage that? And then also, one of the most important questions is what does retirement look like for the parents that are either coming off the farm or they might be staying on the farm but not working? How are we going to manage those conversations? And then the step three is actually having that family meeting. We've got a format that's set up to have that. You don't need a facilitator, although you might find it easy, but having that round table, open conversation, where everyone knows what's what, who wants what, who sees themselves on the farm and who might not.
Speaker 1:I think there is a growing realisation to not put any pressure on children, particularly as they come out of high school, to actually go and explore the world, find out what they really want, find out what their values are and where they want to see themselves. They might have no interest in coming back to the farm. I know I did not want to be an apple grower because I'm terrible at it. I'd cost the dad more money crushing into trees with the tractors. I was awful. I was so awful at it.
Speaker 3:And that's okay. And how about you now, though? Because you're still really part of agriculture, like you're still playing a really important role. You can play important roles in ag and farming that aren't driving around Napa, orchard or growing seed or handling livestock.
Speaker 1:Yes, Surely my clients have some sort of agricultural enterprise or operation and even in the family law space I'm still dealing with a lot of farms and a lot of rural assets and having to manage. In the worst case scenarios where they haven't done a farm succession plan, we can actually manage and manipulate family orders that sets out a farm succession plan through family court orders. You don't want to do that because that's going to cost a lot of money and it's just not the ideal situation. You want to do it on your own terms, not in the family law setting.
Speaker 3:What are some of the other things that you've learned through doing this research?
Speaker 1:I think, just the pure statistics about what's going to happen in the next decade. The Productivity Commission says that there's going to be $3.5 trillion of generational wealth transferred in the next decade, which is a massive opportunity for farming families. However, that comes with a lot of significant risk in terms of that not being documented properly, not being ventilated between all the family stakeholders, all the off-farm children as well, and negotiating that and managing those family dynamics.
Speaker 3:There's a lot at play and a lot at stake when it comes to family farming, so it's important that we take that macro level view too, because it's what really underpins a big part of the agriculture industry. Professor Jackie Shermer has some very useful data in her regional wellbeing survey, which looks at how good life on the land feels for people. Her research specifically ties in with drought resilience, because we all know existing problems, whether it's financial, family or environmental, are only exacerbated by drought. Let's meet Professor Jackie Shermer.
Speaker 2:I'm one of those classic 80s kids who grew up mostly in the city but had relatives who were still on the farm and we spent a lot of time in our summers and in holidays out on the family farms. So I grew up not farming myself but watching the family farm and watching them go through all the different struggles that go along with that, as well as the awesome great times.
Speaker 3:And what was the family farm and where was it?
Speaker 2:times? And what was the family farm and where was it? So, the family farms? They were mostly around Forbes or Garima, which is near Forbes in central west New South Wales, and were mixed grazing and cropping.
Speaker 3:And are those farms still in the family now?
Speaker 2:No, sadly, farms aren't still in the family, so they were sold a while ago, and one of the reasons for that, amongst a number of contributing factors, was the experience of the millennium drought.
Speaker 3:Yeah right, it was a long drought, wasn't it? Sort of 10 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, and I think for me, one of the reasons why I'm pretty passionate about drought resilience is because over the last few decades it's become harder to be drought resilient. The sorts of droughts that we need to be resilient to have changed. So there's a lot of farmers who have invested a lot over the decades in improving their drought resilience who are suddenly finding that they're coming up against the sorts of droughts that they haven't experienced before. So the types of change in rainfall are different. You might be losing winter rainfall where you never have before. There might be drought for more years than you've had before, and then it's intersecting with all of these other events that happen. So, for example, you might come out of drought and then your first two or three harvests end up not being good grade grain because you got a last minute really big rainfall event just near harvest time, and that's happening more often. So it's changing the game in terms of what farmers need to be resilient to.
Speaker 3:And, of course, we're seeing a drought right now in the southeastern parts of the country, particularly SA and Victoria. So you're here to talk about wellbeing and business, and everything intersects, obviously. What's some of the research that you've done recently on farmer wellbeing?
Speaker 2:My group runs a thing called the Regional Wellbeing Survey and every year we go out and we ask around 15,000 Australians about their wellbeing, about how they're coping with a range of challenging events, if they've happened to them, about how liveable their community is. So we are one of the largest surveys of farmers and the only one to focus on understanding their wellbeing. So we get anywhere between 2 and about three and a half thousand farmers and farm workers who take part in that survey.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we really need to go back to how do you define wellbeing? It's a whole lot of things, isn't it? It's not just mental health.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. When we talk wellbeing, we're talking about your ability to lead a good life, and it's definitely about a lot more than mental health. So your ability to lead a good life and it's definitely about a lot more than mental health. So your ability to lead a good life is dependent on a really wide range of things, and so we ask people you know overall, how satisfied are you with different aspects of your life? So we might say how satisfied are you with your life overall? How satisfied are you with your personal relationships, your standard of living, how safe you are in your community, being able to connect to others in the community?
Speaker 2:And what we know is that people who consistently score really low on all those things over an extended period of time actually live seven to 10 years less than people who score really high consistently on those. This has profound effects on your life and, most importantly, while you're living your life, you're enjoying it less, so you're not having that same quality of life, and we want everyone to have a high quality of life for as long a time as we can. So that's what wellbeing is about. It's being able to work, it's being able to volunteer, it's being able to take care of your family. It's being able to do all the things that matter to you in life.
Speaker 3:And so what has?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because there's higher rate of happiness amongst rural Australians has gone down a little bit, while the happiness of urban Australians has actually gone up a little bit, and that means that some factors are contributing to a slight loss of wellbeing in rural areas, and one of the biggest factors we can attribute that to is that there's increasing frequency of people experiencing a range of challenges, and that includes your floods, droughts, bushfires, but it also includes things like really significant disruption to agricultural markets, challenges with supply chains and, in rural areas, really big problems with affordability of cost of living that have increased over that time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really interesting. Are there certain areas that say rural Australia?
Speaker 2:does better in than the city, absolutely. So rural Australia does way better on social connection and volunteering. So for most not all, but for most rural Australians, they'll say that they actually are better social connected into their community. So they feel more socially connected. They're more likely to feel like they belong and like they're welcome in their communities. That's not absolutely every rural Australian, but it's a lot. Rates of volunteering are much higher in rural Australia, although trying to achieve all of the volunteers you need is getting harder and harder. So we have seen a decline in volunteering, but it's still higher than in urban areas. They're really key areas. Plus, people love living in their rural communities a lot of the time. So when we ask, do you like what you've got around you? Do you like, for example, the bush, or, if you're on the coast, the ocean, yeah, the ratings are through the roof for a lot of rural communities. Again, not all of them, but it's more likely than in urban areas that you like the amenity of your local area.
Speaker 3:So what are some of the areas that aren't as good or could be improved?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So access to services and infrastructure that's probably one that I think every rural Australian knows and lives every day. But we've seen a decline in rural Australians' access to things like health services over time, which is very concerning, because we know that for things like drought, resilience, being able to access health services when you need them, when you get into a bit of trouble with mental health and things like that is critically important, and being able to have that easily accessible actually supports your resilience. Infrastructure, roads, telecommunications. We've recently seen a really big increase in the proportion of rural people who say they don't have the basics of good mobile coverage since the 3G network got shut down, so we've absolutely seen that in our data network got shut down, so we've absolutely seen that in our data.
Speaker 3:Wow, it seems like you know, when it comes to telecommunications, we've almost gone back 15 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, it's certainly for rural areas, the closure of 3G, like in our data you can really see it. We survey urban people as well as rural people. In urban areas A little bit of change, not much In rural areas this big decrease in coverage or people reporting good coverage. So that's going to take a bit to really recover from and try and build up again.
Speaker 3:So I really wanted to talk to you about the business of farming and the way that succession also falls into that, because that's, I think, a factor that perhaps a lot of urban don't have in their lives, and how that can affect wellbeing. Is there anything in your data that looks at succession or just, you know, business continuity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in our data we do look at business continuity.
Speaker 2:But it's interesting that you raise the issue of succession, because we often talk about farmers as wanting a family succession on the farm. And it's interesting because some of the farmers we're talking to are changing their view of what succession means Rather than wanting to continue with children farming on the exact same farm. The goal might be, hey, can people stay in agriculture? But it might be the kids are out working on farms on particularly corporate farms as employees for several decades before they own their own farms. So that idea of what succession means is shifting quite a lot. And one of the things we've also been looking at is how the pressure to have succession affects mental health, and we've been looking at that in particular, amongst farmers who are struggling or looking at farm exit, because it's something we don't talk about a lot, but we do get a lot of farmers exiting farming and a lot of families exiting farming in Australia and the sort of social view of that, or the perception of that, is that that's aphonia and our data is showing us that we really need to challenge that perception If the right decision for you is to leave farming rather than to have an ongoing multi-generational succession on the farm.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the best decision you can make is to leave farming rather than to have an ongoing multi-generational succession on the farm. Sometimes the best decision you can make is to exit. So we had one study where we actually followed several hundred people who had left farming over the last two decades and we actually tracked and compared their well-being and what we found was and we also at the same time, we asked people who were in farming are you thinking about exiting? And what we found was that when people start to think about leaving farming, their wellbeing dives. It absolutely tanks. So you know it's one of the most stressful, most challenging decisions you can make, partly because you will have all these expectations about succession and passing the farm on the same people. When we follow them up three or four years after exiting farming, their wellbeing is typically improving and the large majority it was over 80% of people who left farming had higher wellbeing than they did before they left farming within five years of leaving farming.
Speaker 2:So I guess when we talk succession, the first thing we need to talk about is sometimes it's okay to leave the farm. Sometimes the best outcome is not multi-generational family succession if that's not where you're at and where you're positioned to actually succeed and to support the well-being of yourself and future generations of your family. For those who are wanting to do succession and where they're well placed, then yeah, trying to plan for that is really challenging and that's everything from you know. Trying to plan.
Speaker 2:Well, how long do I keep farming? How do I hand over to kids, which kids even want to come back onto the farm? Do you skip a generation? Do you end up farming so that you're in your seventies and it's one of the grandkids who comes back on because the kids in the middle all went not having a bar of it? I got a nice career in the city. Do you encourage your kids to have a big career before coming back onto the farm and risk them not wanting to come back? All these things come up and then that intersects with things like drought and becomes even more challenging yeah, it's a complex space, isn't it?
Speaker 3:I think it's really interesting talking about the attitudes that people have about, you know, leaving the farm is a failure and not having that succession passed down through the family. How do we change that culturally? Because I think it's largely been changed in many other industries. You know, there are plenty of businesses that people might have and that are only for a time, and you sell the business and that's okay, and of course, there's challenges with that. There's challenges, I think, with any kind of form of major change. But why is it, particularly in this farming industry, that it is seen as a failure if you are the generation who doesn't continue farming?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I think part of it is because the identity of being a farmer is really different to other occupations. So when you're a farmer you're tied up with the land you're managing. You know you're a good person if you're a good farmer, if you're taking care of your land well. And I think that sense of responsibility to care for the land not just now but into the future, translates into a pressure and a feeling that you need to be successful. You need to be able to pass that on to future generations, because farming is only successful if you're maintaining the land for future generations.
Speaker 2:So how do we build a picture where it's okay to step in and be that sort of steward of the land for a generation but not have to feel that obligation that it has to be for multiple? I'm not sure. I think it's a shift we need to have. And also there's another side of it which is about you know you build a connection to the land. That's the place you know, it's the place you've grown up on. So if there's these deep place-based connections to farms that you know, you really it's hard to describe if you haven't had them. And I think a lot of urban people don't understand that because they haven't experienced it. That's very different to other businesses.
Speaker 3:Most of our listeners are women. What about the unique role of women on farms? I mean, we know that women, obviously, can have any and every role on a farm. They often, though, do still fall into the sort of daughter-in-law category. How does that play out in terms of wellbeing? Is there any research there around the family dynamics that might be present? It can be a very murky dynamic for some people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, it can. And that's a really big area because we've had big change in recent decades in how women are viewed. So to give you an example, back when I was really early in my career, I was interviewing farmers in Tasmania and I knew that I needed to interview both the husbands and wives, because the majority were husband and wife single family farm enterprises. Every time I rang if I asked to say, hey, can I talk to both of you? I'd always get, oh well, you know, you'll talk to Bruce, bruce, he's a farmer and the wife would almost refuse to talk to me and I kind of had to stop labeling the wives as farmers because they weren't ready to call themselves farmers. Now this is 25 years ago. Things have changed a huge amount since then. So back then if I wanted the women to talk to me, I'd have to sit down, start interviewing the husband and then the woman would come in and just start correcting him about things like the books, you know. Oh well, actually, no, this happened and this happened and we did this and we made this decision and as long as I didn't call her a farmer, we'd be right.
Speaker 2:I think in the last 25 years we've seen that change. Women are now proudly calling themselves farmers. Women are now proudly calling themselves farmers, which is absolutely fantastic. We're seeing greater succession to female farmers. So there is a generational shift going on. But we do still have a very male dominated industry and I think there's a lot of different dynamics going on there.
Speaker 2:Historically, women often had a role on the farm, but also had an off farm job. Now we're increasingly getting everyone on the farm but also had an off-farm job. Now we're increasingly getting everyone on the farm having a range of roles. You might have an agricultural contracting business plus you're doing stuff on your own farm, or you might be working for a corporate agricultural business and you're employed and both husband and wife are employed. There's all sorts of dynamics going on.
Speaker 2:There's still clearly inequitable dynamics when it comes to succession. So we're still seeing more often succession going through the male line than the female and there's a bunch of evidence that shows that that's still the case, even though it's starting to shift. So I think we're in the midst of this sort of really rapid change. I'm not quite sure where it goes next. I think we need a little bit of a kick up the bum sometimes to get some of those inequities worked out of the system, because the other thing we're seeing is real difficulties getting enough people working on farms. We need women to feel able to work on farms, to be able to say, hey, I'm a young person working on a farm with a goal of becoming a farmer and we're still not necessarily seeing the workplace being welcoming to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, why do you think that's the case? You know, like most farmers say younger farmers around my age I think are completely open to having women working on farms, like they wouldn't bat an eyelid. Yep, but maybe there's just something a little bit deeper there, like maybe it's a cultural sort of workplace thing, or yeah, why do you think that is?
Speaker 2:yeah, look, I think it still reflects just that it takes a long time for generational change and that a lot of farms are still farmed by people who are in the very high boomer category, so they're in their 70s and 80s. So if you look at, average age of the farmer in Australia is in late 50s. Now we are seeing a shift to younger farmers, so that's awesome, but we've still got a majority of farms being managed by people who are in that older generation, who have come through that change. But maybe they're still finding it a bit challenging or there's an unconscious bias where they automatically, when they're looking for the farmhand, they preference men because that's just what they're used to. So I don't think it's necessarily even conscious.
Speaker 3:Yeah, or they might, you know, recruit from the pub, say, and you find more blokes there or stuff like that, or just from other guys who happen just to know more guys than they do.
Speaker 2:Women, yeah, and lots of those little things combining can lead to that sort of outcome where, even though we're seeing this increasing amount of out and proud, if you like, female employment instead of the sort of quiet wife in the background who actually does like 50, 60 percent of the work on the farm or but won't call herself a farmer you know we're seeing that shift but, yeah, it takes a while and it takes challenging decades and generations of assumptions that men work on the farm. Everyone has to actually play a role in that and men have to play a role in actively saying, hey, why did I choose that person? Or why did I give an opportunity to that person instead of that one? So just asking yourself that question can help you sort of challenge some of those things that you might not be consciously aware you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did want to challenge you on the average age of the farmer. I hear it a lot it's 56 or 57. But is that really true? I worry that they're missing the full dynamic of the farm, where perhaps there is an older and a younger generation working together and within that there are also women. I really don't like that stereotype of the older male being the average. Is that what the data really says Is the data right.
Speaker 2:It's a really really good question and to answer it. Do you mind if I get slightly technical for a minute or two, Please do? All right, so our main way of knowing what proportion of farmers are male and female is through the census, which is done every five years. When you fill in your census form, you're asked to identify the primary occupation of each person in your household. You're not given a spot to put your secondary occupation. Now, older farmers are more likely to be farming as their primary occupation. Younger farmers are more likely to be doing a primary job off the farm but be farming as well in their secondary occupation. That means that, yeah, there's a lot of younger farmers not being counted in those official statistics.
Speaker 2:I'm still not convinced that it's enough to say that. Actually, you know our average age is dropping. I think it's starting to turn, but we're a little way off that. But yeah, the official statistics very much reflect sort of owner operators, much more than people who are trying to work their way up to owning a farm and might have, say, an agricultural contracting business but also be doing some share farming or leasing some land, who put the agricultural contracting business first on the census. So they get counted as agricultural support services, but not as a farmer. So that's the sort of stuff that comes out. Or if someone says, oh, I better not put myself down as a farmer, so that's the sort of stuff that comes out. Or if someone says, oh, I better not put myself down as a farmer because dad's still the farmer, I'll say I'm a farmhand on the census and they're not getting counted as a farmer. So yeah, the official statistics absolutely have big limitations and I reckon they definitely under-represent younger farmers.
Speaker 2:And I reckon, women too, absolutely, and you know to really get good statistics on that. We ask in our surveys if farming is your primary or your secondary occupation and we find that women are much more likely and young people are much more likely to say that they've got something else. That's first and farming is second. That said, we do still have a lot of people who are working on the farm into very old age without succession happening, and we know that from looking at you know how many people are working into their 70s and even their 80s as the farmer on the farm. So we do also have that and there's a clear challenge for succession pathways in terms of people who were brought up in a generation where you literally worked on the farm until you died, who don't have a sense of what a retirement can look like for them necessarily, or feel they've got no pathway to retirement to help clear the way for someone else to come onto the farm. And obviously the financial dynamics of that are really challenging a lot of the time.
Speaker 3:Alice Burns says women's roles on farms and in communities still aren't being acknowledged in terms of legal succession.
Speaker 1:Again, it's coming back to those stats from the Journal of Rural Studies last year that, yes, 49% of women are contributing to farming community value, but only 10% of family farms are being succeeded by daughters. I found that statistic quite concerning. It's 2025. A lot of for rural women. They're managing the business, homework, cooking dinners, making the hard decisions on the farm and also being the glue in those multi-generational families. So that statistic needs to change Again.
Speaker 1:Every family is completely different and it comes back to those gender attitudes, I believe, and what's come before them and what they've been taught. For instance, I know my father is the most progressive man around, so while they ended up selling the farm and we didn't have to do any farm succession planning, I know that it would have. I've got two sisters and a brother and it would have been a very open and clear conversation had we needed to do it. But I think that is perhaps at the moment still an exception to the rule. Like it's still. It's definitely changing and we're definitely seeing a shift in our farm succession practice.
Speaker 1:One of our clients she came onto the farm and it took 15 years to get that conversation started with her husband's family and just negotiating. So that's a lot of emotional worry, anxiety. I would hate to not know or feel uncertain about my future and where my kids are going to live and where they're going to go to school, and I would also hate to just be totally disregarded about my brain power and what I can contribute to operating a business and my thought and what I think could work and make profit, because, at the end of the day, a farm is a business and it needs to be treated as such and we need to be looking at what type of systems and processes are in place and whose responsibility is that, as well as making that farm sustainable for future generations.
Speaker 3:We all know so many horror stories or stories where things have not gone well. Do you have an example of where it has been done?
Speaker 1:well, sure, the one that comes to mind is this beautiful family where four kids and one of the parents had this beautiful saying that they had so much goodwill in their family at the beginning of the process and they used a facilitator and it was slow but they got there in the end. But they needed to draw upon every bit of that goodwill that they had to get it across the line, which I thought was just so beautifully like. Even families that are so together and good and on the same page and have the same values, they still have to draw upon that to get beautiful family togetherness, to get it across the line, which I think just shows how hard successful farm succession planning is. But if you're going with open eyes and know what's on the table and the dynamics, I think it can be done quite well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's good, just acknowledging that, look, these conversations are difficult, even for the closest families. I think even coming in perhaps with some sort of non-negotiables a positive way. I want to keep my family. We want all the siblings to be in a good place. That's a non-negotiable. Everyone has to be being able to maintain a good, healthy relationship as brothers and sisters definitely to me.
Speaker 1:I think if you get a succession plan done and everyone hates each other, then that's not a successful plan. No, it's awful it's absolutely awful family Christmases how does that happen? And cousins, and those beautiful cousin relationships with your children. That is, to me, the most important thing about family and living on the farm.
Speaker 3:I love your attitude. No offence to lawyers, but sometimes I have a reputation particularly in family law and often when we're dealing with divorce that's where it comes to this of having that competitive side of oh, you're entitled to that and you should be going after that and almost lighting the flames. Yes, I know.
Speaker 1:We do have a bad reputation. But also I was talking to one of my old bosses the other day and we both love going to court because of how academic and interesting it is, but we're too successful at mediating. We know that's never in our client's best interest, so we feel like we're hard done by because we keep our clients out of court. So I'd just like to say that I like to avoid conflict despite being a lawyer. That's my ultimate number one goal and priority for all my clients. But unfortunately there are some bad eggs out there. So you've got to be very careful about if you do need family law advice. Be careful about what type of attitude. Make sure you have that affinity and connection and trust with that lawyer that they're not going to create conflict. That's completely unnecessary.
Speaker 3:When do you think you should potentially ask for independent legal advice? Often you have a lawyer that has been looking after the family's affairs for a long time and you've got that relationship and that's great and if it's all working well, brilliant. But is there ever a time where you think, oh, perhaps you should speak to an independent lawyer different to the family situation that you're in?
Speaker 1:Yes, okay. So there's a couple of answers to that question. If you're going through the farm succession plan process with the family, then at one point, before you sign any documents, you must get independent legal advice, particularly on that deed or family arrangement which you would be signing. So that is the contract at the end where we say everything is getting divided X, y, z here are the wills so that there can't be a claim against the estate upon debt because you've reached this agreement earlier on.
Speaker 1:Before you sign any of those documents, get independent legal advice and every single party or stakeholder to that document has to get independent legal advice. You cannot have the same lawyer for parents or whoever's on farm at that point in time and the same approach you should take. Particularly, you might want to consider, depending on if you're the adult child that is part of your parents in that farm succession plan, you may want to consider whether you speak to your spouses coming onto the farm, whether a financial agreement should be talked about in the family law context. So a financial agreement is what we'd know from the Americanism of prenup. A financial agreement can be done before marriage, during marriage or after marriage, but it might set up the terms about what your agreement is if that relationship falls apart, and that is also another document to avoid court and expensive lawyers.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's tricky though, isn't't it? Particularly if you're young and you're getting married and you don't have kids yet, but you want to. Your life now will probably look quite different to 10 years from now, and indeed 20 years from now, and and your assets and who's worked and who hasn't, and where you've worked, whether it's on farm or off. Yes, I would say it depends on who's worked and who hasn't, and where you've worked, whether it's on farm or off?
Speaker 1:Yes, I would say it depends on who's holding the assets. But again, put it on the flip side. If you had a career and you were giving that up to go onto the farm, had a significant earning capacity but you gave that up and you and your fiancé were planning to have kids and you would have some sort of map or goals together and you would know what that would be looking like, Then perhaps you can consider what happens at XYZ, that you can give a timeline. But again, no one has a crystal ball. No one can look into the future and say this is what our assets will be like, this is what our future earnings are going to be. But you can definitely have those early conversations which I recommend in any beginning of a relationship.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's worthwhile having in terms of expectations around who's working, who's staying at home. That's absolutely right. What if you think you're in a situation where perhaps one person in that kind of farm succession family model really isn't coming to the party? Perhaps you're looking at them and thinking that they're not really there for the whole family unit's best interests. They might be a really difficult character. You know, gosh, our TikTok, feeds and whatever are full of like narcissistic personalities and all of that sort of stuff. What if you do have a scenario like that? I'm very fortunate I have amazing in-laws. I do know people who just I look at them and I just think, wow, how do you deal?
Speaker 1:with that? Yeah. So I would be very knowing and having that feeling and that gut about you're essentially going into business as this person. Is that someone that you want to be making these very important decisions for operations, the marketing about your farm Is that going to work? Are these personality traits going to work well for the farm and in the best interest of the farm? If you know that from an outset, then you should be really thinking about is the agreement in the best interest, not only personally, for your family, but also for the farm's viability and sustainability in the future? I would be. I think my recommendation would be having a very honest, open conversation with the family and perhaps that's when you have a facilitator at that point to deal with that person. Perhaps that's when you have a facilitator at that point to deal with that person. And it's very challenging with those very strong, difficult, rigid personalities to work with. I don't think you should go. If that's not going to work for you and your family, then don't go into business with them. You're making a business decision.
Speaker 3:And, of course, it all comes back to your well-being or ability to lead a good life, and I know we've been focusing a lot on the challenges in this episode, but we all know how lucky we are to live in the country, and getting that message out there that it is full of opportunity, full of fun and community, is also important.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the things we need to challenge a bit is that some of the media portrayals of farmers leads to people thinking that life is a constant misery on the farm, and it's absolutely not so. On average, the farmers in our surveys have slightly better wellbeing than the non-farmers who are of similar age. So there is a little bit of a difference in one age group, and that is that sandwich group you talked about, so the sort of 40 to 55, or even 30 to 55 group. They're under a lot more stress, often high debt. They might be dealing with dad still trying to manage the farm. They've got young kids, so their wellbeing's a bit more average, which it typically is at that stage of life. That's when we tend to have the lowest wellbeing in our life is in that middle.
Speaker 3:That's across the board, isn't it like the 40s?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right across the board, your wellbeing's lowest in your 40s. I just turned 40. You've got a fun decade coming up, you're all good I I just turned 40. You've got a fun decade coming up, you're all good. I just turned 50, so apparently I'm on the upward swing. So I'm looking forward to that and hoping that it really happens. We are, yeah.
Speaker 2:So look, in terms of farmers, we've been hearing a lot of concern about mental health of farmers and those concerns are absolutely valid. But people sometimes think that means every farmer is experiencing significant mental health problems and that is absolutely not the case. The large majority of farmers are enjoying their lives, don't have signs of significant mental health problems, have high wellbeing and can actually cope amazingly well with challenges. So that's the other thing. When we do get things like the drought or the bushfire, the media portrayal of farmers often shows the worst case scenario and that can give a very misleading impression of what's actually going on. So our data shows that the majority of farmers actually cope really well up to two years through drought, and that's pretty incredible when you think about it. That is two years of significant loss of income, two years of trying to maintain really good stock welfare and make really hard decisions. But after the two year point is when it gets a lot harder during drought.
Speaker 3:So the final takeaway have those hard conversations, whether that's how you'll manage drought times, difficulty in farming business or succession.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the biggest questions we need to ask ourselves is okay, we're having this big generational turnover of farmers. How do we help people in their first sort of couple decades of farming to even just have the conversations with people that help them be prepared for how challenging it's going to be? But having sort of some shared knowledge with people who've gone through it a few times can help you maybe reduce the stress just a little bit or help you build those skills that little bit faster, and that can help as well. And I think there's a lot we can do in that space, because even incremental differences make a big difference when you're going through those really difficult times on farm. The other thing we sometimes see is that we've come across some farmers who say oh look, I actually, yeah, I've developed my own ways of, you know, getting through drought or coping or things like that. But I don't talk about them because I don't think other people would approve of them. There's a social acceptability issue. So, for example, a few years back we were looking at what helped.
Speaker 2:What sort of drought resilience strategies did farmers put in place? And for a lot of farmers it was having off-farm income, but a lot of farmers didn't want to talk about that because they felt that you're not meant to rely on off-farm income to get you through drought. And yet it was actually working really well for them. Some of those people were able to, you know, destock early, keep the ground cover, and then they were able to ramp up again after drought a bit faster. And a common theme was oh, you know, I'm not sure the neighbours would approve of what I've done, or I'm not sure other people would approve, so they're not talking about it and we need to help people feel like anything that helps you get through, anything that you know. There's a thousand ways you can be resilient to drought and a thousand different strategies can work, because every farm is different.
Speaker 3:And Alice's advice is to make sure that you, as a woman in a farming business, are there for those important conversations too.
Speaker 1:To any of the women listening your voice, your observations and your questions. They deserve to be part of that farm succession plan. This is your life. You've got to put yourself first. There's nothing wrong with that. Be selfish, be self-aware, go for it.
Speaker 3:You've got it, you can do it and that's it for this episode of ducks on the pond. But don't go anywhere. We've got a winner to announce. So thank you to our guests, alice Burns from Cheney, southers Lawyers and Professor Jackie Shermer of the University of Canberra. And now for our giveaway with Buy Cece Fine Jewellery, the long-awaited announcement. I had hoped to bring in Ashley Malloy, the founder, for this, but she is sick unfortunately, so get well soon, ash.
Speaker 3:Let's do the draw for the winner of the Piper Gold Ring, and thank you so much to all the people who entered. I am going to do this via random number generation, so the winner, the winner, is number 15, who is let me go down my list number 15, hannah Harris. Hannah Harris, congratulations, you have won a Piper Gold ring. You will receive an email from me very shortly so he can get that beautiful ring by by CC fine jewelry sent out to you. This is the last episode in season 7 of ducks on the pond. Thank you so much for listening, but don't worry, we will be back very soon with some great collaboration episodes. If you're interested in a ducks on the pond collaboration mini-series, then get in touch. We're also on the lookout for our next season sponsor. Could it be you send me a dm at ducks on the pond on instagram, or you can email me, kirsten, at ruralpodcastingcocom. Thank you again for your support and I'll speak with you again soon.
