The challenges of farmer succession

This week Christchurch hosted the 2025 Primary Industries Summit. As this article in the New Zealand Herald noted, alongside the summit Rabobank released a new white paper on farmer succession, titled "Changing of the Guard". The white paper outlines the challenges that the farming community in New Zealand faces in preparing to transfer farms to the next generation of farmers, as well as highlighting the experiences of some farming families that have been relatively successful at managing succession. In his overview of the white paper, Rabobank CEO Todd Charteris wrote that:

Succession can be a highly emotive process and is becoming increasingly complex. The stakes are increasing as the value of farming assets continues to grow amid challenges around maintaining profitability in the face of geopolitical, regulatory and climatic hurdles...

New Rabobank data (February 2025) shows that only one-third (33%) of farmers have a formal succession plan. However, over the next 10 years, more than half of all New Zealand farm and orchard owners – around 17,320 farmers – will hit retirement age.

The scale of the challenge is clearly large. I made a research contribution to the white paper, along with my colleagues Frank Scrimgeour, Gemma Piercy-Cameron, and PhD student Kalpani Vidanagamage. Our role was to collate and summarise demographic, economic, and land use data from various sources, and to conduct some focus groups with young farmers to understand their experiences and aspirations related to farm succession. You can see our contributions to the white paper in the various quotes from young farmer focus groups early in the report, and in the data reported on pages 13-18.

There was far more detail in the data we had available than could fit into the white paper. Rabobank have held over some of the data, possibly to be used next year. However, we intend to write up our findings for a more academic audience in due course (and I'll blog on it in more detail at that stage).

To some extent, this project was a 'back to the future' moment for me. In 2010, I published an article (co-authored with Pat Barrett, Bill Cochrane, and Kellie McNeill) in the International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic, and Social Sustainability (it is gated, but contact me for a pre-print version if you are interested) that covered very similar ground. What we found in 2010 is not dissimilar to what we found in 2025 - rural population decline, ageing rural and farmer populations, and succession challenges, were leading to the aggregation of farm holdings and the corporatisation of farms.

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.