Farm Insurance Agents - Your Long Term Planning Partners

As a farmer you know that being successful is not easy. Over the years (decades) you and your fathers and perhaps grandfathers before you have invested ideas, efforts, money, and your time - your lives really, in making your farm grow. As a farmer you also know that achieving success - sometimes that simply means surviving while others around you fail, is hard, but remaining successful over time is even harder.

I am sure you are not reading it here for the first time, that there is a huge threat facing you, one that stands in the way of where you are now and where you want the family and the farm to be in the future. You know instinctively what that threat is, it is a lack of long term planning. You know from experience, watching what has happened to your neighbors and association members, that there is a direct correlation between long term planning and the likelihood of your family retaining the success everyone has sacrificed to achieve.

I know farm insurance agents who spend countless hours talking with you and your contemporaries about the importance of looking down the road 5, 10, 15, or more years into the future - in order to make clear the importance of acting now to protect what's already been created. The biggest mistake you can make is not listening to them, and continuing to treat the need for long term planning lightly.

Seriously, does it make sense to spend your life building a successful enterprise but fail to invest a few hours in planning its orderly continuation when you leave. And you will leave, one way or another - make no mistake about it.

Farm insurance agents have all the proof anyone should need, based on their experiences and those of their companies when it comes to the relationship between planning for the future starting today or not planning until you get a round to it. They will be able to illustrate to you that failing to plan for the seamless continuation of your farm business can be a very costly mistake. And it is true that some mistakes your farm can absorb and continue to move forward - but the mistake of not planning for the future will absorb the farm itself and all you've worked for.

I know you have things to do and anyway business continuation planning isn't urgent, is it? Can't it wait for a week, or a month, or maybe another year? Don't you take it for granted that you'll still be in control then and will decide later when you'll retire?

Well, think again. You know that it is not unusual to hear about a farmer your age or younger who died unexpectedly. Every month when you receive your association's journal don't you see the name of someone who has died that causes you to remember how young they were and how great they looked - in such obvious good health. And don't even think about your high school class. Every year more people are on the deceased list than the last time you looked and they are your age, people just like you.

Here is something farm insurance agents can tell you about, statistics. I know that statistics don't mean anything unless you're one of the unlucky ones. But ask them anyway. "Based on my age, what are the chances that I will die before retirement? How likely is it that I will be disabled during that time?" And if you are in business with partners, what does that do to the odds?

Only when you know the risks you face can you really determine whether your farm can survive if you don't. When you do not plan and take the actions required of any prudent business owner - you lose control to the fates. Then if you or one or more of your partners is forced out due to death or disability - there could be a very real crisis for personal let alone business survival.

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