Excerpt from a spoken interview (YouTube) featuring Vance Crowe emphasizing the importance of intra-family communication for preserving multi-generational family farms. Crowe describes founding 'Legacy Interviews' to record family life stories and argues that parents often overestimate how much their children know about family history, values, and inheritance wishes.
Chapters
You know, if we, if I think about the most important group that farmers need to talk to is probably their own families. I do. I actually, when I left Monsanto, I started a company called Legacy Interviews, where I record families telling their life stories so that the future generation knows about their history, about where they came from, about what they went through. And what has been absolutely staggering to me about this many things have been. But, but the thing that really strikes me is the parents when they're doing these interviews are often like, oh, the kids know this, they know that we didn't grow up with running water. Or they know that, you know, that I started off by having a horse that pulled the plow. And then you talk to the kids, they don't know. They don't have any idea. And you think about like, if you don't know those stories, what other things do you not know? Well, they don't know how dad feels about them or about how mom, what she wants from the inheritance that she's passing down. There's so much that's going on within these families that they have worked their entire lives, in fact entire generations to be able to pass something down that's valuable and the message that is embedded in that is not being communicated. And so I think the, the first and foremost place where people can improve. If you want to be a farmer, if you want to be a multi generational family farmer, it's figuring out how to communicate. Not with people that are going to buy your products, you know, abstractly or at the farmer's market, but the people that you're working with and living with and trying to pass things.
