As I have said before, our family should be the illustration next to the phrase “land rich, cash poor” in the dictionary. The whole farm is about 200 acres, and with developers zeroing in on our neck of the woods, we know it won’t be long before we are approached with serious offers. In the town where I live, there is a local family who sold a large family farm about 10 years ago. Two of the members of that family, Betsy and Ralph, are in our congregation and have become close to us. The next time my parents will be visiting us, I’m going to have Betsy (and maybe Ralph) come and share what she/they learned in the process of selling large amounts of land to a developer. Betsy has already given me lots of wisdom and eased my mind considerably just in our brief conversations at church this morning. I’ll be honest. My biggest hurdle to selling our land is emotional. As it is for my father as well. Primarily, I believe, that is because I have the most physical contact with the land at the moment. I take the children up there once or twice a month. They play on the farm and run across the wide expanse of fields, the same fields I used to run on, the same ones my dad used to work and play on as a child and youth, the same fields my grandfather and grandmother and great-grandparents farmed and lived off for well over 100 years. That kind of history, of connection to the land is hard to come by these days and is precious to me. These are the forests where my family chopped down our Christmas tree every year for more than 20 years. These are the woods where I expored the old log cabin and watched my grandma cut little baskets out of mollypop seeds.
The best thing that Betsy said to me today was, “think what you can do with that kind of wealth, of how generous you can be.” And Betsy is not a greedy soul. She lives meagerly and quite frugally. She and Ralph are both “salt of the earth” kind of people. She said that, yes, they all cried and mourned the loss. And I think she has much to teach me about parting with land to which you have an emotional connection. It’s hard to know that someone now lives where the old cow barn stood or where the wellhouse once was. Her primary advice was to stick together. and not to allow spouses to make any decisions. that this land is your land, this land is my land, it does not belong to those who have come to the family through marriage. it is not part of their childhood, part of their blood. She also said to hang onto the land as long as is possible. Her family sold for $35K/acre and the last holdout in the area, a widow, just sold her adjoining property within the past year and got $400K/acre for her 30 acres.
The nicest part is that I am realizing that I truly can take some leadership in all this. I have been feeling like I was at the whim of my family when, in fact, I am just as much a partner in the family trust (how we jointly and equally own the farm) as anyone else. I want us to be organized about this and informed about it and make the best possible decisions with the information we have. I feel excited and empowered about the farm in a way that I haven’t felt before. Mostly that I am finding resources for my family to help us through this huge emotional and financial undertaking that lies before us.
Posted by journeymom 