We help families become great families. Agland exclusively assists family owned agricultural land businesses to find their future then act to achieve it. This may include strategic focusing, preparing succession, champion development, leader and loyalty building, or farm, ranch or forest plan design. And, in exceptional circumstances, we facilitate capitalization of land conservation.

DEFINING OWNERS’ VALUE HOW FAMILIES BECOME GREAT

Agricultural lands are farms, ranchlands and forests. A land business plan may indicate a capital priority, or, may prioritize some auxiliary function like recreation, community education, conservation philanthropy, or even pristine recreational farming.

Regardless of any preconceived or concluded mapped direction, enduring and resilient plans are intelligent, which means that they start with finding the owners’ purposeful direction: Finding the Owners’ Value. Owners’ Value is not necessarily monetary. Finding Owners’ Value answers the questions: what return do I receive from my invested capital, and essentially why do I want to be an owner in this land business (what do I get out of it)?

Once these questions are first answered individually, joint owners can then potentially reach agreement on what they desire the business to achieve. Only with owner consensus on what the business will achieve and perform, can planning be intelligent.

Owner Value is personal and can be elusive. Finding it requires personal and family growth, which is always difficult. But, without laboring to find a commonality between owners, there will be resource expenditure without purpose, contention and depression.

Owner Value is the only thing owners can truly own. Owner Value consensus is vision. The stronger the vision, the greater the land’s performance will be; performance in achieving the Owners’ Value.

WHY PLAN?

A person without a plan will achieve very little alone. Planning is employing brilliance. It increases cognitive vision and achievement exponentially. It allows us to practice decisions and see outcomes on paper before capital is expended; capital like wealth, energy and life. A plan allows us to change our mind as we gain experience from practice. It allows us to practice contingencies and act decisively when they emerge. A plan forces us to act strategically; which is to decide what we want and work to achieve it.

Even if answers seem obvious, plans need to be written and mapped in order to make clear and communicate what change is wanted. Avoidance of committing a plan to paper is merely a lack of decision. Lack of decision is fear; fear of participants or successors diminishing what has already been achieved, legacy or ego. Fear eliminates performance.

LAND IS NOT A BUSINESS; OR SO WE’VE BEEN TOLD

In Accounting 101 we learned that land is only a tangible asset, only something used to support the real business or to be held as a speculative investment. That’s tax thinking. Great families have already figured out that the land is the business. Just a slight line of thinking adjustment from asset to enterprise changes everything important. For example succession planning is no longer confused with estate planning. Although both are important, estate planning has no purpose other than planning for the costs of personal taxes, it does not help to plan the continuation of a thriving family business across generations. That requires succession planning. Most business consultants, financial advisors, lawyers and accountants, having never practiced family land business succession don’t understand the difference.

The lack of effective family business succession preparation is the singularly significant reason family agriculture is disappearing. Succession must be practiced longer than any one lifetime in order to be understood. However contradictory to academician theory, failing to structure an agricultural land as a stand-alone business in today’s tax & regulatory climate will ensure that you will eventually loose it.

SO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT: THAT’S THE HARD PART. WHAT NOW?

How rapidly the land begins to perform what we want depends on the quality of a plan. Working land plans have three parts:

1. Knowing what physical land attributes there are to work with by measuring, mapping and collecting metrics (Assessment). (anyone qualified including government (with adequate direction), consultants and staff)
2. Vision and Strategy (owners with facilitators only)
3. Operational instructions (managers and staff)

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO WORK WITH?

What is the potential for the land to create Owner’s Value? Is the land marsh or desert, forest, grapes or pasture? Is it well developed or wild? What developments are there already that can be used now?

Assessment is the word used for figuring these things out. Assessment is the foundation of strategy.

Here is a fundamental list of information needed in order to achieve any significant agricultural development or plan conservation to achieve Owner’s Value:

1. Maps depicting various differing:
   • current usages and or vegetation cover
   • water sources and streams
   • soil types
   • agricultural developments
     • roads and access
     • irrigation
     • fencing and stock water systems
     • facilities
   • Quantification of all of the above (e.g. Water allotments or acres of pasture)
2. Metric quantification and quality evaluation of all of the above (e.g. timber cruise, soil, water or forage tests)

WHAT A GOOD LAND STRATEGY LOOKS LIKE:

1. It has legacy; vision out 25-50 years or more and understood clearly by everyone.
2. It has committed purpose; all owners are engaged and in agreement.
3. It’s crinkled and coffee stained because it’s used to guide everyone and every decision about what happens on the land.
4. It has a clear and simple mission: The Land’s Mission, an all encompassing goal.
5. It has plain language goals, checked, rechecked and changed as necessary on a regular basis to ensure they are working to achieve the defined purpose and complete the Land’s Mission.

WHAT A GOOD OPERATIONS PLAN LOOKS LIKE:

1. it portraits the vision, mission, and strategic goals.
2. It describes who will be responsible and what success is.
3. it has working small scale maps showing current status and planned operations
4. it has large scale maps communicating what will be built or developed
5. it has detailed standard procedures for all complex operations (to be followed whenever normal conditions are true (or most of the time)).

SUMMARY

Is this all too complex? True, it’s very complex, but not as complex as football, for example. And, how does one become great at football?

It’s all very academic to the onlooker, but in practice academics evaporate and academicians become competent practitioners.

Second in importance only to choosing a spouse1 in determining life’s quality, A family business land plan is a daily reminder of how one chooses to live with the land, and the quality of it left behind once a life is finished.