Farm Transfers in Quebec

Merritt Clifton was an environmental journalist and lived in Brigham, Quebec.

The Quebec Farmers’ Association commissioned and published Farm Transfers in Quebec to help their English-speaking members better understand the laws involved in transferring a farm from generation to generation, from individual to partnership or corporation, and from individual to individual.

There’s no doubt that the laws are complicated and have caused many a farming family excessive hardship. Many farm families have actually lost their farms because they didn’t understand how to avoid succession duties, the implications of zoning laws, or how to manage quota transfer. Thus, the Q.F.A.’s effort to synthesize and clarify is both welcome and necessary.

Unfortunately, Farm Transfers in Quebec author France Grou is an economist rather than a professional writer. Her understanding of farm transfer laws may be excellent. Her economic advice seems sound. But her prose is complicated, convoluted, and ultimately no more informative than the bureaucratic jargon she was supposed to be translating.

As a former $10-per-hour technical ghostwriter, back when $10 was worth about what $15 buys today, I recognized the Farm Transfers in Quebec text as closer to what I usually started from than what I finished with. It is an expert’s notes toward clarification, not clarification itself. It still needs simplified language, expanded explanation of difficult passages, flesh-and-blood examples of how each kind of transfer works, and informative diagrams. It can be dangerous, because it is not everything a farmer with only a high school education or less needs to know before making out his will or putting his property up for sale. The information may be there, but not the style or skill to get it across to people who don’t absorb five-syllable words and fifty-word sentences.

Farm Transfers in Quebec is a start — it offers summaries of all the laws involved under one set of covers, in English, easily available. But it’s not the quality job that farmers need.