Understanding the diversity and the personal experience of successors during farm transfers: case study in French cattle farming

Farm transfer, whereby a new farmer takes over as head of an agricultural holding, is a crucial phase in which transferors and successors must succeed in aligning their expectations. While most literature focuses on transferors and factors of transfer success, the present research offers a better understanding of the complexity of this phase and the personal experience lived by successors, with a case study in France. The analysis was conducted in 2019–2020 in the French sub-regions of Puy-de-Dôme, Doubs and Ille-et-Vilaine, focusing on successors who had taken over farms in the period between 2005 and 2018, most of which were cattle farms. The aim of this research was to contribute to the understanding of the different types of successors and the respective challenges they face during their taking over of a farm, through the development of an indicator for measuring the way successors personally experience farm transfers. Successors fall into three broad categories: young farmers directly taking over from their parents and starting out as business associates with them; late-coming farmers, whose level of education is generally low and who are not usually related to the transferors; and women with a high level of education seeking a change of career and taking over farms with family connections, although not their parents. In spite of the diversity found among these successor types, all are broadly satisfied with the farm transfer and emphasise, as a key factor in the success of the transfer process, the importance of good knowledge of each other to both transferor and successor.