By CAROL HUNTER
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
July 24, 2005

My siblings and I gathered at my parents' home last Easter to deliver our Christmas present: a work weekend. We patched and painted the old milking barn, hay barn and tractor shed - white, two coats each.

My dad will turn 84 next month, and mom is 81. They're in good health, but have no business climbing scaffolding to paint anymore. But the upkeep of the buildings worries them. They've spent their married lives building up the place. They can't bear to see it start to look rundown.

They had more on their minds that weekend, though, than peeling paint. They gathered everyone around the kitchen table Saturday night to discuss the question confronting thousands of once-rural families now spread across the country:

What will happen to the farm?

As the Des Moines Sunday Register's stories last week and today have documented, states such as Iowa may see as much as 50 percent of their land change hands in the next 10 to 15 years as aging farmers turn over their property to heirs or buyers. This seismic shift poses the potential for gut-wrenching change for families, communities and farm states.

The kitchen-table discussion about my family's 435 acres took place in Kansas, but the same dilemmas, emotional and economic, face families across Iowa. The choices won't be easy. They involve fundamental motivations: Love. Money. One's purpose in life.

The experts say the first step for farm families is to have a plan. Mom and Dad have tried. They've put the land into a trust. That night, they passed around copies.

It seems straightforward: When one dies, the surviving spouse controls the trust. When he or she dies, whatever's left will be inherited by the five children. With the land, each has the option to buy out the rest. If we can't decide collectively what to do, a brother, as executor, will make the decision.

If the legal language is unambiguous, though, not much else is. It seems impossible to separate the competing tugs of nostalgia, smart business and the greatest good.

My father was born on a century farm, bought in 1893. When he returned from World War II, in 1945, after flying on bombers over China and Japan, he bought 160 acres nearby. A neighbour's grandfather had homesteaded the land - the patent bears the signature of Ulysses S. Grant. The rest of the land was added later, every acre as familiar to my parents as their faces in the mirror each morning.

To their credit, they wanted all their kids to get a good education, to go to college if we wanted, to follow our dreams. Each did, perhaps not realizing for years that the collective result would lead us all off the farm. We go back mostly to see them, of course. But the land draws us, too. Each visit, there's the ritual walk, now comprising four generations, down to the creek to check the water's depth and skip some stones. Or maybe continuing to the "half moon," the field's shape cut by the curving creek. Or we'll stroll the other way, to the pond or nearby slough, guarded in our youth by a snapping turtle big enough, we were convinced, to bite off a foot.

We can't let this go. One of us will come back to the farm and . . . Then the practical realities sink in. The closest of us lives 150 miles away. Three live out of state. All have careers. The 435 acres is a small operation these days. It's questionable whether one of us could swing buying out the others.

And there are the nagging community-good questions. Dad was a 45-year member of the Soil Conservation Board. My parents put in terraces and waterways and rotated crops. We'd owe it to their legacy and our core values to be good stewards. With attentiveness and a good renter, absentee ownership can do justice by the land. But farms also can deteriorate under distant neglect. And checks mailed out of state don't help support the farm operator, the country church, or Main Street.

Economics and emotions entangle again. It's like the age-old parent-child question: Will we love the land best by holding on tight, or letting go?