Fostering farm transfers from farm owners to unrelated, new farmers: A qualitative assessment of farm link services

Farm Seeker Needs Versus Farm Owner Offers: A Comparison and Analysis in the U.S. Midwest and Plains

“…These mechanisms and services attract the participation of hundreds to thousands of farm owners per year, most of them commodity feed grain producers (Beck, Carter & Circo, 2018;Girardi, 2015). These are longstanding formal attempts to connect farm seekers to land access (Valliant et al, 2019), some of which provide a financial incentive to owners who choose a qualifying beginning farmer as their farm's next operator or owner. Since these are much higher owner participation numbers than what is seen by any other type of initiative, in the region or nationally, these programs may provide exceptional insight into patterns of high demand for, and supply of, some types of commodity production resources.…”

“…Dedicating additional farm transfer support to existing specialty crop, dairy, and hog/poultry operations would also be well justified. As an example, the Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship provides one such model (Franzluebbers et al, 2012;Valliant et al, 2019) because it provides a two-year training program through which new grazing-based dairy farmers prepare to lead existing dairies, with master graziers serving as mentors. It creates a mechanism for transferring established dairy operations into the future.…”

“…Food system innovation and agricultural productivity can benefit from improved farm transfers (Leonard, B., Kinsella, O'Donoghue, Farrell, & Mahon, 2017;Ruhf, 2013). Agricultural programs and policies, known as farm link programs, for over three decades have implemented a range of strategies to assist farm families in transferring their land to farmers of the next generation (Valliant, Ruhf, Gibson, Brooks, & Farmer, 2019). A number of terms refer to these next-generation farm seekers and subgroups among them, including beginning farmers (USDA ERS, 2019), young farmers (e.g., Ackoff, Bahrenburg, & Shute, 2017), nextgeneration farmers (e.g., Harper, 2015), firstgeneration farmers and multigenerational farmers (e.g., Inwood, 2013).…”

“…Another observed incongruity is that seekers wish to farm close to metropolitan markets and amenities, while owners' farms tend to be too rural for those seekers. In short, there appears to be a mismatch between the needs of farm seekers and the offers of farm owners, such that some analysts have asserted that farm linking services are not very effective (Hersey & Adams, 2017;Ingram & Kirwan, 2011 (Farmer & Valliant, 2016;Valliant et al, 2019). A purposeful strategy aimed to select every farm link service that operates in these states, or that did in the past, in order to learn from information-rich cases that are active as well as those that have discontinued services (Patton, 2002).…”

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“…Despite the upsurge of interest in financial incentive policies, little is known about their characteristics, impacts, and reach (Schilling, Esseks, Duke, Gottlieb, & Lynch, 2015;Valliant, Ruhf, Gibson, Brooks, & Farmer, 2019). Given the critical need to facilitate land transition and access to land, it is our view that these policies should be assessed together as a body of Land Access Policy Incentives (LAPIs).…”