For many months the newspapers have been full of stories about how high home prices in Australia’s big cities are keeping young people out of the market. I was speaking about this last week with Katie Innes, a young lawyer who has recently bought a house in Canberra. Katie stayed at our farm in Berriwillock after speaking at our recent big data workshop. Katie’s area of expertise is business structures; in particular co-operatives and she explored the idea of a data co-operative as a possible structure to enable farmers to share their data in a way that we can have control over its collection and distribution.
Whilst Katie and her partner can keep their work and personal lives separate, as part of a family farm it is all closely intertwined which is maybe why when Katie and I were touring the farm, talking farming and the farming way of life I was comparing my early married life to hers.
For starters, we weren’t scouring the papers looking for our dream home and stressing out about housing prices because the house was just an add-on to the main game, the farm.
For the early years of the farmer’s marriage, most of us start in a house we’ve had little role in choosing (in our case it was decided many years before I came on the scene). Often it is a house you don’t own yourself and for the farmer’s spouse you’re not even sure who does own it!
Which brings us right back to the issue of business structure and how it impacts on family life. So often it is some ‘entity’ within the farm business that owns the newlywed’s house and working out if you have any control over that entity can be a tricky business for a newlywed. In our case, our farm business runs through a series of trusts and our house is owned by one of those. When John and I married, his dad Tom was the director of that trust.
Trust was the key word in all of it. A trust owned the house. I had to put my trust in John’s dad before I could start building my farming life, making that house my home and growing a family. Anyone who knows Tom knows I am very, very fortunate in my father-in-law but it is easy to forget that for a person marrying a farmer, they take on a whole lot more than that one person. Often the structure of that family farming business is not spoken about until after the wedding but it can impact a lot on the newlywed’s future happiness.
Getting back to Katie, she was very keen to talk about house renovations because they are planning to update their kitchen once they’d paid off a bit more the mortgage (no need to wait for a good year like last year before choosing the benchtops!). I had to recount one of my favourite farming life stories told to me early in my married life by a local woman only a few years older than me. When she first broached the idea of renovating her husband’s family home she was told in no uncertain terms that if it was good enough for his mum for 30 years then it was good enough for her!!
Whatever structure you choose for your farming family business, be it sole ownership, partnerships, a company or trust structures like ours, keep those conversations going because when it all boils down to it, trust between family members is the key.
Photo credit: Melina Morrison (Business Council for Co-ops and Mutuals)
