Date of Award

12-11-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

Department

Agricultural Business & Leadership

First Advisor

Abdelaziz Lawani

Abstract

Tennessee has over 77,300 farms covering 10.8 million acres that counts for about forty-one percent of the state’s 26.4 million land acres (DeLong et al., 2023). However, access to land for young, beginning, or minority farmers who need farmland and starting their farm enterprise journey can be challenging. The challenges identified by farmers in general in the U.S. range from factors of production such as financial resources, labor, management, and physical resources. Land prices and insecure leasing terms have also been identified as factors that affect farm land ownership (Horst & Gwin, 2018). This study highlights and discusses the challenges farmers face when operating their farm enterprise and examines the determinants of them having a succession plan. It uses survey responses from 152 farmers in Tennessee. Its employs cluster analysis to segment farmers from the data set into distinct groups based on various characteristics such as age, ethnicity, farm size, income level, access to resources, outlook on succession, and education. Natural Language Processing was also employed to highlight the most common or prominent challenges that beginning, young, and minority farmers face in Tennessee. Finally, to identify the factors that explain the possession of a succession plan, it uses a logistic regression model. From our findings, we found the importance of tenure and age when it comes to understanding succession planning among beginning, young, and minority farmers in Tennessee

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