Series three of Tales of a Nuffield Scholar continues 🎙️ This series is looking at some of the biggest challenges, innovations and conversations shaping agriculture today, and this time we’re getting into a topic that affects so many farming families, succession 🌾
I was joined by Heather Wildman, a 2012 Nuffield Scholar, founder of Saviour Associates and someone who has played a pretty important part in my own Nuffield journey as my mentor. Heather grew up in Cumbria, left school at 15 and has gone on to build a career helping farming businesses with leadership, communication and succession.
We spoke about Heather’s Nuffield Scholarship, which explored how to influence and motivate positive change. Her travels took her across the world, from Australia and New Zealand to South America and Canada, including a visit to a high security prison! Her biggest findings came down to three things, vision, communication and collaboration, principles that have shaped much of her work since 🌍
Heather shared how succession became such a big part of her career almost by accident. Through her Cultivating Leaders programme and work with farming businesses, she kept seeing families struggling to have conversations about their future. That eventually took her back to Australia to learn from succession specialists before developing her own guide and approach to helping farming families.
We got into the challenges around inheritance tax changes and why succession is about so much more than tax. From understanding the finances of a farm to deciding who actually wants to take over, when responsibilities should change and how to treat family members fairly, there is a huge amount that needs to be discussed. Heather explained how sometimes the biggest challenge is simply getting everyone around the table and having an open conversation 🌱
One of the most interesting parts was hearing Heather talk about how the farm itself can almost become another member of the family, sometimes taking priority over relationships, time together and everything else. We spoke about the pressure younger generations can feel to follow in their parents’ footsteps and why giving people the freedom to choose their own future is so important.
There were some brilliant stories along the way too, including Heather’s own journey from missing out on a role she had set her heart on to building a business that has helped farming families across the country. It was a great chat about communication, family, business and making sure succession is something we actually talk about rather than continually putting off.
Thank you to NFU Mutual for their support of this project.
Enjoy! 🙂
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