Keep Your Farm’s Legacy in the Family
Farm Succession Planning Services
A thriving operation won’t last without a plan to pass it on. Your life’s work deserves more than a handshake agreement and hoping for the best. Partner with UnCommon Farms to build a structured blueprint that ensures your family farm successfully transitions to the next generation on your terms.
Prioritize Your Goals Worksheet
Complimentary download — clarify what matters most before your first conversation. Succession planning takes 18–24 months on average. The best time to start is before the pressure arrives.
Get Our Farm Succession Goals Worksheet
Succession Planning Is Complicated—We Bring Clarity
Most farm owners know they need a transition plan, but few actually have one. That’s not because they don’t care, but because the process can get messy. Legal documents. Tax exposure. Family disagreements. The weight of those pieces together can bring the conversation to a dead stop before it ever begins.
At UnCommon Farms, we take a personal approach to succession planning, helping you untangle the legal, financial, and relational complexities of handing off your operation. Whether your timeline is five years out or five months, we meet you where you are and build a plan that actually holds together.
Your Custom Succession Blueprint
Our consultants work directly with your family from the first discovery call through fact-gathering, evaluation, and a formal presentation of your plan and recommendations. From there, we build a concrete Phase I action plan with priorities listed, sequenced, and ready to execute.
What you walk away with is a written evaluation backed by:
- Organizational charts
- An operating structure chart
- Entity valuations
- A prioritized action plan with recommended next steps in order of importance
But the most valuable part isn’t the paperwork. It’s the role we play throughout the entire process. Our consultants serve as the quarterback of your transition by coordinating between your family, your attorneys, your financial advisors, and every other stakeholder involved.
The Succession Planning Process
Here’s how we work, from first conversation to completed plan.
Discovery Call
Understanding your operation, goals, and family dynamics
Fact-Gathering
Assets, entity structure, existing documents, key relationships
Evaluation
Analyze legal, tax, and family alignment
Plan Presentation
Deliver recommendations and your written evaluation
Phase I Action Plan
Priorities sequenced and ready to execute
Phase I Implementation
Helping you take the first steps
Find Out Where Your Farm Stands
Before you can plan a transition, you need an honest picture of your current operation. Get in touch and we’ll help you evaluate your farm’s readiness for a leadership or ownership transition before a crisis forces the conversation.
A Complete Plan for a Complex Transition
Succession planning is a layered process that touches your legal documents, your tax strategy, and your family’s most difficult conversations. Our services address all three of these aspects, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Estate Planning Services
We review your existing wills, trusts, and ancillary estate documents to check that they align with your long-term goals and overall succession plan. From there, we provide the strategic blueprint your legal advisors need to draft the documents.
Tax Strategy Services
Beyond estate and inheritance taxes, a well-designed succession plan creates opportunities most advisors never think to pursue: income tax strategies, self-employment tax savings, and equity transfers under capital gain treatment to preserve more of what you’ve built.
Family Dynamics
When business and family are intertwined, well-intentioned conversations can become a source of conflict, and the hardest ones rarely happen without help. We evaluate the family side of your transition, helping everyone get aligned around a shared vision before pressure forces the conversation.
What Separates the Farms That Last
Second-generation farm survival is 30%. Third-generation survival is 12%. Only 3% of farms make it to the fourth generation. Those numbers aren’t meant to discourage you. They’re meant to focus your attention on what the 3% consistently get right. The operations that successfully cross generational lines share five traits:
- They lead with a management mindset.
- They prioritize succession planning over estate planning.
- They identify and develop their successors early.
- They define what’s fair rather than what’s equal.
- They commit to clear and consistent communication across the family.
None of that happens on its own. It’s built deliberately, with the right guidance and the right people in the room at the right time. That’s exactly what we help you do.
From Planning to Execution: The Membership Advantage
Here’s the hard truth about succession plans: most of them sit on a shelf.
Not because they were bad plans, but because no one was held accountable to them. Research confirms it: people are 42% more likely to achieve their goals when they’re written down, and 90% perform better when they have someone keeping them accountable. The standalone package solves the first problem. Membership solves the second.
While your blueprint delivers the plan and guides you through Phase I, our membership program puts a dedicated coach in your corner for everything that follows. Every milestone, every disagreement, every unexpected development that a transition inevitably brings.
If you’ve already completed a standalone succession plan with us, that investment applies as a credit toward full membership. You don’t start over. You pick up where you left off, now with the coaching and accountability infrastructure to see it through.
What Our Clients Say
Navigating the complexities of passing down the family farm, ensuring its financial stability for future generations, and building a thriving agricultural business requires expert guidance. At UnCommon Farms, we specialize in addressing these challenges by teaming up with farms to handle succession planning intricacies, make informed financial decisions, and provide hands-on coaching for goal achievement.
Get a glimpse of how UnCommon Farms has made a difference for others in similar situations.
What is UnCommon? It’s being willing to be a stepping stone for others on their journey. It’s being willing to extend a hand to help someone else succeed.
Farm Succession Planning FAQ
We don’t know where to start. Is that normal?
It’s one of the three most common things we hear: Where do we start? How do we start? Who can help us? You’re not behind. You’re exactly where most families are when they first reach out. The process begins with a discovery conversation about your operation, your goals, and where things stand. That’s it. We take it from there.
What if we’re in a ‘limbo period’ and don’t know who is taking over?
You’re not alone. Many operations find themselves unsure whether the next generation is coming back. That uncertainty can make it feel impossible to plan. But waiting isn’t a strategy. We can help you position your business for maintenance or growth while you work through the decision from navigating buyouts between partners to transitioning ownership to non-family employees. We help you protect what you’ve built regardless of who ultimately takes the reins.
Our farm has unique dynamics. Can you actually help us?
Every family thinks their situation is uniquely complicated, and in many ways, it is. We’ve worked with multi-generational operations navigating sibling disagreements, farms without clear heirs, partnerships on the verge of fracture, and everything in between. Our process is customized to your family, your values, and your goals from day one.
Does UnCommon Farms act as my legal counsel for estate documents?
No, and that’s by design. We work alongside your existing legal and financial advisors, not in place of them. Our role is to provide the strategic transition plan and facilitate the family alignment your attorneys need to draft final estate documents effectively. We give your advisors the blueprint. They execute the paperwork.
How do I know if it’s the right time to start?
There’s no such thing as too early. Only too late. Most families who delay do so because the process feels too difficult or because no one wants to be the first to have the hard conversation. We help you start where you are, not where you think you need to be. If your operation is generating revenue and you have people who depend on it, it’s time to plan.
Keep Your Farm in the Family
You’ve spent a lifetime building something worth passing on. Don’t leave its future to chance. Partner with high-performing industry experts to ensure your life’s work continues to thrive for generations to come.