Sixty years after the Double T dairy farm went into business in California’s Central Valley, owner Tony Azevedo sold his cattle, partly due to unrelenting drought and partly out of frustration over disagreements with his son on transfer of the business to a new generation. Roughly 30 percent of U.S. firms are family-owned and family ownership is the traditional model for farmers. “As parents reach retirement, the transition of control and property to their children is so notoriously difficult that some families now call in professional ‘succession planners’ to held avoid all-out war,” writes Kristina Johnson in “Death of a Family Farm,” at FastCompany.
“It’s not uncommon for children to sue parents or for parents to write children out of the will,” says Johnson in her in-depth account of Tony and Adam Azevedo’s acrimonious disagreements over the future of the dairy farm. “He couldn’t give up control,” says Adam, who wanted to expand the herd and bring in new, and expensive, equipment. He was willing to drop the farm’s certification as an organic dairy because feed was hard to find in the drought. Says the father, “I’d like to cock him one, too.” They don’t speak to each other although living within shouting distance.
“Family issues are the No 1 reason family businesses fail,” says Wayne Rivers of the Family Business Institute, one of the business analysts quoted in the story, which was produced in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.