Handing Over the Reins: A Comparative Study of Intergenerational Farm Transfers in England, France and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most critical stages in the development of any family business is the transfer of its ownership and control to the next generation. However, the process by which this transfer is achieved in farming has been one of the least-researched facets of farm business management. This paper draws on an on-going research project which seeks to remedy this omission. Comparable data for a total of 3, 500 farms in England, France and Canada has been analysed to provide a portrait of the main features of the process in which the older generation retires from the farm while the younger generation takes over its ownership and management. The paper begins by defining the three distinct, but interrelated, processes of inheritance, succession and retirement. Focusing on the process of succession, it briefly summarises some of the main similarities and differences in current practice among farm families in the three countries. Having presented a typology of patterns of farming succession based on a review of the literature, the paper goes on to modify this in the light of findings from the more recent surveys.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".