I. Family Farming and Ranching

How do you keep the peace, have family love and harmony and run a demanding business with family members? How do you keep business and family relationships straight? Do business conflicts ruin family togetherness? Can family togetherness interfere in resolving important problems in farm and ranch management? Here are six essential elements for running a successful multi-family or multi-generation family farm or ranch.

1. Selection of compatible partners. Not all children ...

Question. What do you think is the most important management tool for farmers and ranchers? Marketing? Precision farming? Financial analysis aided by computer applications? Diversification? Wrong!

Human relationship skills are what farmers and ranchers need to master in order to get to the next level of management. Why do I say this? Consider these factors:

- A happy marriage. A farmer who has an equal and mutually supportive relationship with his wife wi ...

Estate planning can freeze you in your tracks. It is complicated. It is legal. It requires tough decisions. Most of all it projects yourself forward in time beyond your lifetime. Not exactly a fun topic to think about, let alone take action.

This column is written on behalf of wives who feel trapped in one-sided marriages in which their needs aren’t being met.

Their husbands aren’t drunks, women-chasers, mean, bossy or jerks. They are good men who have retreated

Passing on the family farm is the lifeblood of agriculture. Who gets the farm? Why do some children leave and some stay?

These are questions addressed by rural sociologists Glen Elder and Elizabeth Robertson of the University of North

Any farm or ranch family in agriculture today deserves recognition for the farming success and family management that has enabled them to survive. Millions have left agriculture since the 1920s. Today’s two million or more farmers represent