Everyone in a family has some attribute that can be used to benefit the family business. Some of the obvious ways are a contribution of manual labor or administrative support. As would be expected, many of the less than obvious ways are difficult to determine, but they can be just as beneficial to the entire family. A couple of the templates we use in our Landowner Legacy Communication© seminars help families determine what those attributes are and how the family member might feel they can be useful. It is the responsibility of the current generation to work with those in the next generation(s) to find their niche that can be of benefit.
In this post, I explain how our daughter has and will continue to benefit our family tree farms. She was born with some serious hip issues that h
ave required numerous surgeries. Because she has to be careful where and how she walks, we do not expect her to spend a great deal of time walking on our tree farms. However, she is a professional meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Her education, knowledge, and experiences are called upon when we need to have both long-term and short-term weather forecasts. We ask her for forecasts for the short term, “should we spray this week?” or long term, “should we plant seedlings next spring?” For a tour of our farms, sponsored by the Arkansas Tree Farm Committee a couple of years ago, she discussed the short-term and long-term potential for rainfall in light of 
planting, prescribed burning, and harvesting operations. She also provided the landowners that attended with different websites that they might use for weather and climate information.
In addition to serving as our “in-house” meteorologist, she also helps with records management, electronic data storage, and GPS or GIS data.
In my next blog, I will describe how another of our adult children participates in our family tree farm business.
Photos courtesy of NOAA websites
LandownerLegacy.com 