Succession Planning for Farming Families: Why Wills Matter Now More Than Ever

Facing the Hardest Conversation

Farmers are very good at dealing with difficult things, weather, prices, disease, broken kit on a Friday evening and yet the one subject that stops even the toughest family in its tracks is death. No one wants to talk about it, and most people convince themselves that avoiding the conversation is the easier option. Unfortunately, all it really does is hand the problem to the people left behind. With the Government more interested in squeezing hardworking families than stopping the boats drifting in, relying on the state to sort your affairs is a gamble no sensible farmer would take.

Why a Will Matters on a Farm

A will is not just a document for advisors to fuss over. On a farm, it is one of the pieces of structure that keeps the business intact, prevents fallouts between siblings and ensures the right people end up with the right parts of the enterprise. Without a clear, valid will, the law decides who gets what and those rules are about as well-suited to farming as a combine is to hedge-cutting.

When there is no will, or when an old one quietly collapses because it was witnessed incorrectly or never updated, the estate falls into the intestacy rules. These rules follow a rigid line of succession that takes no account of who actually farms, who lives on the land, or what the family intended. These situations are rarely fair, always stressful and often very expensive to resolve.

What a Good Will Should Achieve

A good will is not complicated. It just needs to be clear, up to date and aligned with how the farm and property are actually owned, not just how people assume they are. It begins by revoking any earlier wills and appointing the right executors and trustees, because these are the people who will manage your wishes, and they need to be capable of doing the job rather than simply the nearest available relative. Once that structure is in place, the will can set out the personal instructions, funeral wishes, organ donation, guardians for children and any other points that matter to you and your family. The gifts themselves must fit sensibly within the reality of the business and there must be proper substitute provisions, so the plan still works if a beneficiary dies first. A Letter of Wishes can also be extremely helpful, especially where there are several children, because it explains the reasoning behind your decisions. It gives the next generation the context they need and that context is often what prevents friction and the misinterpretations that can cause problems later on.

Different Family Structures, Different Challenges

The real challenge, of course, is tailoring a plan that fits your family. Not all farming families look the same. Where there is just one farming child, the priority is keeping the working land together and ensuring any partnership agreements, company structures, property ownership and wills are all pointing in the same direction. Where there are multiple children and only one farms, this is where fairness becomes most difficult to define. The farming child needs the core of the business to stay intact, while the non-farming children need to feel recognised and not simply brushed aside. Fair does not always mean equal, but fairness still matters. This often means using non-essential assets or building nonfarming assets during your lifetime, to create value for the non-farming children without undermining the business.

Where several children farm, the issue is not fairness but contribution. Farming roles are rarely equal. One child might carry the business on their back, while another turns up for a free ride. Treating those roles as identical is a guaranteed route to resentment. As a minimum a partnership agreement must reflect the real picture, and the will must support it. Families fall out most readily when they are left to interpret silence.

When a Will Tries Too Hard to Control the Future

But even when the roles are clear and the plan feels sensible, there is another trap that catches families out. It is the instinct to try and secure what someone believes is the right future by structuring the will in such a way that the people living with it have no room to adapt. Farming carries history, identity and a sense of legacy, so it is easy to think that locking the property into a fixed outcome will protect that legacy. The problem is that farms are run by people, not paperwork. If the will focuses too heavily on preserving the asset and not enough on the lives, needs and realities of the people involved, it stops guiding the family and starts restricting them. And that is when even the best intentions can quietly turn into long-term problems.

I am dealing with a case currently that shows how a will can create problems by trying too hard to control the future. A father left his 150-acre farm in trust, giving his daughter income for life and the capital to charity afterwards (his farming son had predeceased him). Perhaps harsh, but his intention was to protect the land from being sold by his nonfarming daughter. What he ignored was the reality: while the daughter grew up there, she never had the opportunity to farm, the land produces very little income, and the trustees, his own sisters, feel trapped between duty and exhaustion. The daughter feels restricted. The charity waits for its entitlement. The likely resolution is that the daughter will have to be bought out of her life interest, the charity will ultimately go on to sell the land and the farm will pass to another family anyway, but only after years of strain and legal costs, that could have been avoided. It is a reminder that planning for the property is not the same as planning for the people.

Trusts Still Matter

However, the issue here was not the trust itself, but the purpose behind it. Will trusts, used properly, can still make a genuine difference, particularly when it comes to protecting against long-term tax exposure. The government’s recent change to make APR and BPR transferable between spouses was presented as reform, but in reality, it simply mirrors planning that most advisers were doing, specifically through the use of trusts. What it did not do, of course, was increase the relief. The £1 million threshold remains frozen, even as land values continue to rise, a textbook case of fiscal drag, quietly pulling more farming families into the tax net with each passing year. It is classic presentation over substance, the political equivalent of being reversed over by your own tractor, being handed a wheelbarrow and a leaflet titled Understanding Government Support.

Which is why the structure still matters. A trust can still be used to manage succession gradually, keep land under family control and protect against future growth in value. If £1m worth of land is settled into trust of the first death and later rises to £1.25m, that £250,000 gain sits outside the surviving spouse’s estate. Without the trust, that increase could face a 20% tax charge. Trusts can also help preserve the Residence Nil Rate Band, manage development value and provide structure where second marriages or differing expectations might otherwise complicate things. Where the original will was not drafted with this in mind, a Deed of Variation may still offer a second chance, provided it is used within two years of death and the original beneficiary is willing to cooperate.

Succession is a Process, Not an Event

Ultimately, succession is not a one-off event. It is a process that needs reviewing as families change, businesses grow and land shifts hands. The will, the ownership documents and the partnership or company structure must all line up. That is what keeps farms stable across generations. To end on a practical point, make sure someone knows where the original will is kept because a perfectly drafted will is of no use at all if no one can actually find it…