Planning helps avoid family farm succession issues

January 15, 2025

Farmers sometimes face unique circumstances in the protection of assets. It requires planning, according to Jayna Voss, an attorney, and co-founder of Sioux Falls-based Legacy Law Firm. The firm specializes in estate planning, business planning and elder law. Many of the firm’s clients are farmers “because they generally have a lot of issues that they need to work through in order to have a successful estate plan and also have a successful succession and business plan with their farm and ranch,” said Voss, during an interview with the South Dakota Soybean Network. “And it’s really all intertwined with the estate planning, business planning, and if you live long enough, elder law planning.”

Voss, along with her law partner Bobbi Thury, presented a session during December’s South Dakota AgOutlook in Sioux Falls about planning for financial difficulties that commonly threaten the fiscal wellbeing of family farms. An example is long-term nursing care. It’s expensive, and because people are living longer, there’s a good chance such care will become necessary. If there are at least five years to plan prior to nursing home care being necessary, Voss says an option is a tool called a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust.

“The client will decide what they want to protect and place those assets into the trust. And if they do that five years before they’re even looking at care, then whatever they put in those trusts would be protected from nursing home costs,” said Voss, explaining how the mechanism works. “Typically we use those to put in the client’s house and their land.”

Voss is to be featured on an upcoming edition of The Soybean Pod, the podcast sponsored by the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council. The primary takeaway from the South Dakota AgOutlook presentation, according to Voss, is that it is never too early to make a plan that addresses the eventualities of aging, retirement and death, “because that’s really the best gift that you can give to your family,” said Voss. “By taking time to make a plan, by having well-drafted documents – and an important part is keeping the plan up to date – then that is going to go a long way to keeping family harmony and setting the family up for success.”