Overview
An investigation of a succession planning service offered to dairy farmers in north-east Victoria in 2015.
Project Summary
Retirement and management transition (or succession) are complex processes in family businesses, including family farms. Yet the level of engagement of farmers in formal succession or business transition planning remains poor, and this is a concern for both governments and agricultural industry organisations. The Alpine Valleys Dairy Succession Project (AVDSP) was a pilot project delivered to dairy farmers in north-east Victoria in 2015 that aimed to assist interested farmers to identify and begin implementing some next steps in planning for retirement and succession on their farms. Dairy Australia commissioned RIRG to investigate what occurred in the AVDSP, in order to capture learnings to inform further service development.
The research involved qualitative interviews with ten farm families who participated in the AVDSP and with the two consultants who delivered the service. The research questions investigated were:
- Does a short term intervention to set family businesses on the right track assist with more businesses reaching agreement on their farm transition arrangements?
- What features of the intervention facilitated the successful engagement of farm families?
- What lessons emerge from the experiences of both the families participating in the trial intervention, and the consultants who delivered the intervention to inform further development and implementation of similar interventions?
Conclusions were that there is value in offering farm families a short-term intervention to help them to either get started, or to take the next step, in their farm succession/transition process. Key lessons that could inform further development and implementation of similar interventions include:
- The selection of consultants to deliver the service is absolutely critical to its success.
- The service will need to be offered repeatedly at regular (e.g. annual) intervals, to capture participants as transition issues come to the top of their agenda.
- The goal of the service should be about getting a process started, or to keep it moving, and not about producing a document. This introduces some complexity in defining the scope of the service to be provided.
- It needs to be clear in the design and implementation of the service that it is the interests of the farm family, and not the interests of industry, that are paramount.
Project Duration
August 2015 – June 2016
Research Group Leader/Key contact
Michael Santhanam-Martin
Contact details
Michael Santhanam-Martin
mpmartin@unimelb.edu.au
Partnership details
Dairy Australia
Publications
Santhanam-Martin, M, Learning from the Alpine Valleys Dairy Succession Project, 2016, pp. 1 - 20
Santhanam-Martin, Michael. 2016. "Starting a process: Practice and policy lessons from a farm succession planning intervention in the Australian dairy industry" 12th European IFSA Symposium, Harper Adams University, UK, 12-15 July 2016, 12-15 July 2016
Santhanam-Martin, Michael, Patten Bridge, and Lillian Stevens. 2018. "Working with stuckness: lessons from an intervention to support intergenerational transitions on Australian dairy farms." Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement:1-18. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2018.1517302