by Hal Brown, LICSW
 

Updated 6/24/00 - Many aspects of farm stress arise from circumstances you can't influence, like the weather and commodity prices. Now, with the crisis in the cranberry industry approaching disaster proportions, predictions are that as many as a third of all cranberry growers will out of business in a few years. To make matters worse, there is the added component of politics that have caused growers to turn against growers and family members against family members. Parents who hoped to pass their farms on to the next generation are having to face a bitter reality - there may be no farm to pass on. Young growers who looked forward to carrying on a family tradition must reassess their future plans. All this is causing incredible stress.

Changing what can be changed and accepting what can't is an axiom, a sensible part of anyone's life philosophy. 

The cranberry disaster aside, farm family conflict is a major farm stress where the underlying etiology can be identified and changed. Since families are composed of individuals, and individuals can change, it stands to reason that when there is family conflict, if each person involved makes appropriate changes, the conflict will be resolved. It sounds so easy. But it rarely happens. That is why a fairly new profession has emerged in the psychotherapy profession, as a subspecialty of occupational psychology:  family business therapy. 

In a larger sense there are elements that are similar between conflicts within a real family and conflicts between unrelated farmers who have found themselves on opposite sides of the often emotional disputes currently going on within the industry. The approaches used by a family business therapist can be adapted to work effectively between non-related individuals who are business adversaries where there are psychological impasses to conflict resolution.  

First a word from our $ponsor, not!
or Buyer be Aware.

Instead of calling it therapy, however, new user friendly terms seem to be in vogue. For example:

A article in the New York Times BUSINESS Section (Sunday, November 22, 1998), by Julia Lawlor, described the work of one such practitioner, David Gage, founder of Business Mediation Associates.  The article also quoted factors which cause family business conflicts from Sherrod Morehead and Peter Caffee of Family Business Advisory Partners.

First psychotherapists marketing to businesses, trying to soft pedal the clinical aspects of their job and loath to suggest that what they did as treatment, became consultants. Now they seem to be mediation associates or advisory partners. Most of them are licensed mental health professionals, or should be, who use all the standard techniques of family psychotherapy and group therapy with only minor modifications. I'd say  psychotherapists are psychotherapists whether they are treating post-traumatic stress, anxiety disorders, or farm stress. These, often "dressed to kill" business therapists will tell you that the name changes are meant to destigmatize treatment. As far as I'm concerned, this is a lot of hooey. 

Call it what you will, resolving family farm conflicts
with a professional psychotherapist is still therapy.

Farmers, whether they manage a large or small farm, and business owners and executives, are loath to admit they might need therapy. A dysfunctional conflict ridden farm family business, or any other family business, is little different than any dysfunctional family, except for the business angle which can keep feuding  family members together long after they would in other circumstances have parted company.

The primary cause of farm stress caused by family business conflicts is the older generation being unwilling to cede control to the younger generation in a timely fashion. I'll never forget an incident I observed forty years ago when two electricians were completing a project where I was a student intern. They were father and son. The father was close to ninety, and the son was about seventy. The poor "boy" could do nothing right, and was criticized all day in front of staff and clients for his lack of aptitude. I can still visualize Dad on the ladder, yelling at Junior to hurry up with that wire stripper. Dad thought he was doing Junior a favor - time is money after all. Too bad Prozac wasn't invented back then, because Junior could have used a massive dose.

It is all so simple. No matter how much blood, sweat and tears the older generation has put into a business, whether  McGillicudy's Apple Orchard or Antanachio and Son Electricians, there is always a time to let the next generation take over.

First generation farmers seem to think they are unique because they took a piece of virgin land and with a strong back, shovels, wheel barrows, ox or draft horse, turned it into a farm and made something grow. But they are no different than the founders of any business, no different from my great grandfather who started selling clothes from a push cart as an immigrant from Russia in the 1930's and ended up owning a large clothing store, and no different from the man everyone loves to hate, Bill Gates, who started Microsoft with nothing but an idea. They are no different, in fact, from an accountant or a doctor who takes a son or daughter into a business or practice that they developed over twenty or thirty years. If they eventually plan to pass control to their children, they need to know how and when to let go.

Usually this involves moving from the role of boss or manager to the role of consultant and eventually out of the business entirely. Unfortunately many parents don't seem to understand that a consultant consults if and when they are called in to do so, and doesn't manage or boss.

Family farms are different in one way from many other family businesses in that children generally start working from an early age, and the boys at least, are encouraged to continue in the business if they have any interest in doing so. There is a tradition of immigrants starting businesses such as laundries and restaurants where the children worked, but my sense is that generally the parents' goal was to send the children to college and see them take different career paths.

When a child works for a father there are ample opportunities to hash out differences as they are growing up. If they couldn't do this in the early years, they will have problems later on. The seems especially true when the child goes off to college and/or into the military and returns with  new sense of self-esteem and much more confident and assertive than before. But old patterns are difficult to break, and if the parent persists in treating their offspring like a child, it will cause hurt feelings or outright rebellion.

It is beyond the scope of one article to describe all the variations of family business conflict, and all the approaches family business therapists use to help resolve them. Even using the term "dysfunctional family business" is misleading because there are degrees of dysfunction.  Family dysfunction can better be considered to be a continuum from less to more severe. When there are conflicts that cause emotional pain, psychological or physical symptoms in one or more members, it is reasonable to suggest there is dysfunction within the family business.  Listening to the victims (yes, I mean victims) of this kind of farm stress, their emotional pain and anguish  is often palpable. Often this pain is hidden not only from the farming community, but from other family members. Individuals suffer in silence, sometimes oblivious to the fact that other family members are also hurting inside. 

The Myth of the family farm

The happy farm family, moving from generation to generation, feeding, sheltering and clothing the nation and the world by making things grow (animals, fruits, trees, vegetables, etc.), does exist. But I would hazard a guess that as many small to mid-size family farms cease to exist because of family farm conflicts as are swallowed up by corporate farms. Still, the image of the multi-generation family farm is great for advertising, so the myth is perpetrated. Even though small family farms account for less and less production every year, you'd never know it from the images we see on our television screens.

While all this may be effective advertising, and honest advertising may be an oxymoron, my concern isn't truth in advertising; rather it is how farmers themselves may be ill served if they believe the myth. The statistics are grim regarding how many family farms actually survive from one generation to the next.  It is common sense that when people start a family business, their intention is to pass it one to one or more of their children.  The causes of failure aren't always family conflict. The market certainly plays a role, and the fact that the children may simply not be interested in a career chosen for them by their parents is another. But often it is family conflict that is the deciding factor. While this article emphasizes conflict between parents and children, conflicts between siblings or  cousins can be the culprit. Farming is still a male dominated profession, so there are always potential conflicts with the females in each generation. Do they opt out of the business entirely or do they elect to become hand-on farmers? Do their husbands become involved in the business? It is a clich�, but a true one, that in-laws can often become outlaws. When a man marries into a farm family business, he is always marrying the business in addition to his wife. 

More Risk factors

To give them their due after razing  them for calling themselves Family Business Advisors, I want to give Sherrod Morehead and Peter Calffee, of Family Business advisory Partners, Inc. (Cleveland. Ohio) their due by sharing an excellent list they came up with of sources of dissension in family business. All of these are potential sources of conflict in family farming. Even one of them can lead to the failure of a family farm to survive intact from one generation to the next.

How to help change   

Suffice to say that learning to listen to each other, to recognize, and to appreciate each other's feelings are crucial. It is also a must that both parents and children, brothers and sisters, cousins and in-laws, learn to honestly assess their own responsibility for contributing to the conflict. They need to understand how words can hurt, how even body language can communicate criticism. They need to understand how in a family dynamic, there may be no such thing as "constructive criticism" (another oxymoron?).

Everyone has to admit to themselves that they are not perfect, and may have personality characteristics that make themselves difficult to live with. They may be narcissistic, stubborn, arrogant, insensitive, domineering, demanding, dogmatic, and authoritarian. Or at the other extreme, they may be indecisive and passive-aggressive. They may foster dissension among other family members as they replay unresolved childhood conflicts. They may feel threatened by new farming methods or alternative approaches when suggested by someone they still see as a child needing their guidance. It is generally better for the older generation to:

• ...be asked for advice than to volunteer it.

• ...let their offspring learn from their mistakes than correct them in advance.

• ...wait until a project is complete before seeing how it went.

• ...make good morale a higher priority than doing a task their way (when both ways are adequate).

• ...ask rather than tell.

• ...work under the direction of their  farm manager (offspring or not).

Another factor which leads to farm parents having difficulty letting go and ceding control to their children is their own fears about growing old and eventually dying. Every life phase forces adjustment, and it may be that the final phase is the hardest of all to accept because it ends on no schedule, which can come anytime within a span of thirty years after age seventy. In fact as we approach the millennium, for many old age will be their longest life phase.

Farmers can retire from active family farming and still remain a vital part of the family farm business as a consultant well before old age. They can live on the farm, take vacations at will, enjoy financial security, and the joys of nature. Moreover, they can be emotionally and physically close to their children and grandchildren. And they can do all this by letting go when they still have a good portion of their late middle age to live. All it takes is knowing how and when to accept that well-earned consultancy.