Note: LSP’s next Farm Transition Planning Course will begin meeting Jan. 27, 2026. For details and information on how to enroll, click here.

Sometimes a successful farm transition requires a shoulder season — a period when the current owners are still present, still have their hands in the soil, so to speak, but the newbies are taking a significant step toward ownership and long-term stewardship of the operation. On Seven Songs Organic Farm, the 2024 garlic planting day represented just such a linkage between the past and the future.

When Melissa Driscoll and Jay Hambidge owned and operated the farm, each fall they invited neighbors and friends over to their seven-acre organic produce operation near the southeastern Minnesota community of Kenyon for the labor-intensive endeavor, which involves sticking thousands of garlic heads into the ground in preparation for the following growing season. During last year’s garlic planting day, two new faces — Relyndis and Marius Tegomoh — were on hand to help. Beginning in 2025, they would be the farmers harvesting and selling the results of this mass planting. In other words, within a few months of the 2024 garlic planting, the Tegomohs would become the official owners of the farm, a culmination of months of planning, paperwork, telephone calls, and dinner table conversations. For Driscoll and Hambidge, the planting of garlic for the next owners of their operation was a major milestone in their transition out of farming, and an indication that the Tegomohs were serious about taking up the baton and running with it.

“It’s like, we’re going to go through with this, they’re going to go through with this,” says Hambidge while sitting in the South Minneapolis house he and Driscoll purchased in January 2025 after moving off the farm.

The couple felt confident handing over a farming operation they had spent years building up from scratch thanks in part to a Land Stewardship Project Farm Transition Planning Course they participated in the previous winter. Through the course, Driscoll and Hambidge were not only exposed to the legal, financial, and logistical steps for a successful farm transition, but figured out how such a major life shift fit with their own personal goals.

“The Farm Transition course was mission critical for our move,” says Driscoll.

… And Another 5 Years

In a sense, Melissa and Jay’s use of an LSP workshop to step out of farming brings them full circle, given that it was their enrollment in another initiative facilitated by the organization, Farm Beginnings, that helped launch their agricultural career in the first place. For over a quarter-century, Farm Beginnings has been offering training that focuses on the goal-setting, marketing, and financial skills needed to establish a successful farm business. Through the Farm Beginnings class, LSP organizers introduce students to holistic business planning; in addition, established farmers, as well as experts on farm financing, marketing, and other topics, give in-depth presentations. Driscoll and Hambidge took Farm Beginnings during the winter of 2008-2009, and in 2010 purchased their farm. After farming for several years, they took a follow-up LSP course, called Journeyperson, which at the time provided advanced farm business planning and a mentorship connection with an established farmer.

Over the years, the couple built up a successful produce and egg-laying operation that utilized a combination of farmers’ market sales, wholesale contracts, a delivery service (in the case of the eggs), and value-added products such as pesto to sell food to eaters in the Twin Cities area. They refurbished an old barn as a packing and storage facility and added a greenhouse to one side of it. Driscoll and Hambidge also erected hoop houses and instituted certified organic methods. Melissa says that over the years she felt she was able to achieve several goals for the farm, including gaining consistent access to profitable markets, utilizing rotations between cover crops and chickens to build soil health, and showing that she could juggle several thriving enterprises.

But they knew that their time was limited on the farm. Both Driscoll and Hambidge are originally from the Twin Cities area, and Jay, in particular, had always felt very strongly about moving back to Minneapolis eventually. In addition, vegetable farming can be hard on the body, and Driscoll was starting to feel the effects of spending countless hours in the plots and hoop houses planting, weeding, and harvesting.

“You come to a different point where you’re still in love with farming but you’re like, it could eat me alive if I let it,” she says.

Driscoll had served on a land access and emerging farmer committee convened by LSP and through that learned that it can take as long as 10 years from the time a farmer begins planning a transition until it’s completed. Driscoll is 59 and Hambidge is nine years older.

During the winter and spring of 2023, the couple enrolled in LSP’s Farm Transition Planning Course. The online workshop offers sessions on the legal and financial logistics, as well as long-term care considerations, of transitioning a farm to new owners. Not surprisingly, participants are encouraged to do such things as calculate their financial needs for retirement and describe the communication style that they prefer. But the workshop also has participants do homework around their goals and values as they pertain to their own quality of life, the land, the next generation, money, and the kind of legacy they’d like to leave. Do you want to make sure children or other family members are farming the land after you leave it, or are you okay with the idea of non-family members working it? How do you want that land farmed? How willing are you to “let go” of being involved with the operation of the farm once you retire? Those questions and more are mulled over by course participants during a series of visioning sessions.

Driscoll and Hambidge found the sessions on navigating the legal and financial logistics of passing on the farm useful, but it was the homework they did around values and goal-setting that really prepared them for seriously taking the next steps toward passing on Seven Songs. They each wrote down their own individual goals, and then compared them.

“If it takes 10 years, I’m going to be in my late 60s and Jay would be in his late 70s when I actually transfer the farm,” Driscoll recalls thinking. The couple started talking about the need to sit down and plan their post-farming future. It was easy to put off that discussion — maybe they’d have it in one year, two years, or five years?

“And Melissa suddenly one day said, ‘You know, we could always be looking at five years down the road,” says Hambidge. “We need to start the clock now. There are personal goals for our lives, and some of them were all these things in life I want to do, and they didn’t involve being on the farm. And it was interesting for me to see that Melissa had a bunch of goals that didn’t involve the farm, either.”

Hambidge’s long-term goal was to move back to Minneapolis, and, among other things, work with homeless people. For several years, while delivering Seven Songs eggs to customers in the city, he would drive through homeless encampments.

“It bothered me deeply, it broke my heart, and I wanted to do something about it,” says Hambidge, who now works with outreach to Twin Cities youth who are homeless or in danger of homelessness.

Driscoll, for her part, wanted to have more of an opportunity to hike, canoe, and do other things in nature — the irony of an outdoor job like farming is it doesn’t leave much room for actually enjoying off-farm out-of-doors activities. She also felt she could use her food production skills to support nonprofit organizations in the city.

But perhaps even more importantly as far as the future of the farm was concerned were the goals and values the couple shared: both wanted the land to stay organic and be stewarded using regenerative methods — not a given in an area where conventional corn-soybean production dominates. In addition, they wanted the farm to go to a person of color. Through her work with LSP’s Land Access Committee, Driscoll had learned about the barriers farmers of color face in getting started farming.

A century ago, there were an estimated one million Black farmers in the U.S. Systemic racism, unfair USDA policies, discrimination on the part of lenders, and land title disputes, along with general economic challenges in agriculture, have combined to whittle that number down to less than 42,000 Black farmers, owning less than 1% of the country’s farmland. Farms with at least one producer reporting as Black decreased by 13% between 2017 and 2022, nearly double the percentage of overall farm loss, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture. The Ag Census reports that 95 farmers in Minnesota identify as Black.

For Hambidge, the desire to see Seven Songs farmed by people of color is personal. It turns out that before the Civil War his forbearers, the Hairston family, once owned 45 plantations in four states, with combined holdings of over 10,000 slaves, reputedly making them the largest slaveowners in the South. Hambidge says he literally had nightmares about his family’s connection to such a horrific legacy, and feels a strong urge to do something about it.

Both Driscoll and Hambidge acknowledge there is a big difference between the discrimination relatively new immigrants from an African nation may face (the Tegomohs immigrated from Cameroon a few decades ago), and the long legacy of racism and trauma that comes with being the descendants of slaves. However, they still feel strongly about passing Seven Songs on to emerging farmers who may face barriers to land access not experienced by their white counterparts.

Soon after taking the Farm Transition Planning Course, Driscoll started looking for a new owner. She reached out to Big River Farms, a Twin Cities-area incubator operation for new immigrant farmers, as well as the Latino Economic Development Center. She also listed Seven Songs in LSP’s Farmland Clearinghouse, as well as other regional farmland clearinghouses. In all, 30 or 40 farmers contacted them; and as many as two-dozen were serious enough to actually visit the farm for a tour, in some cases participating in a work day. Melissa told visitors that she would get the farm appraised to Farm Service Agency standards, and after she received the appraisal, she e-mailed them to inform them of the price.

Eventually, Seven Songs was sold for $10,000 under the appraised value. Driscoll says she purposely underpriced it because of what she had learned through LSP’s Land Access Committee about the barriers farms of color face. It turns out farmland ownership plays a big role in helping families amass the kind of wealth that can be passed on from generation-to-generation.

“My family has generational wealth, and I feel lucky,” she says. “So I was like, ‘You know what, I can afford to do this.’ ”

One of the first people to call Melissa back after receiving the e-mail about the farm’s price was Relyndis Tegomoh. She had a simple message to convey: “Don’t sell my farm.” Driscoll was a little taken aback, and responded with a laugh: “ ‘Your farm, Relyndis? Really?’ ”

‘Everybody Farms’

Over a year after that fateful call, Relyndis laughs about how forthright she was about purchasing Seven Songs. She recalls stepping into the house on the farm and noting immediadately how the inside was painted the same color as her home in the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville.

“I was just laughing. It was like I had walked into my house,” she says while sitting in the living room of her new home on a recent October afternoon, a box of garlic bulbs in one corner and various battery-powered tools in various states of being charged in another.

But it was what lay outside the house that really won Relyndis over. She liked the dark richness of the soil, and that there was a mixture of trees and grass present. A lifelong raiser of vegetables with an entrepreneurial streak, she also liked that Driscoll and Hambidge had set up infrastructure such as hoop houses, a greenhouse, and a packing shed. She and Marius were also familiar with raising chickens, so were thrilled to see the farm was set up to produce eggs.

“It just clicked — it was fate,” says Relyndis.

In some ways, the farmer feels she has been preparing her whole life for that moment she stepped onto those seven acres near Kenyon. In the Tegomohs’ native Cameroon, she says, “practically everybody farms,” even if they have a town job. In Relyndis’s case, she worked as a high school teacher, but also raised a variety of fruits and vegetables to supplement the family budget. In the mid-1990s, the Tegomohs immigrated to the U.S. to escape political upheaval — Marius had lost some of the fingers on one hand as a result of the violence and came to Minnesota for reconstructive surgery. As soon as they rented a house in Saint Paul, Relyndis put in a raised bed for vegetables. Later, when they went looking to purchase a house in the Twin Cities area, her desire to grow vegetables played a major role in their home tours.

“Every time we looked at a house, I wanted to look at the backyard,” recalls Relyndis. “That was my priority — being able to grow food.”

Eventually, they found a house in Roseville with a big backyard that had plenty of room for raised beds, a composting system, even chickens. Marius works at Saint Thomas University and over the years Relyndis worked as a home health care assistant before opening a successful hair braiding business. In 2020, she had to close that business as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With more time on her hands, Relyndis decided to scale up her production of food. She and Marius dug up the entire backyard and started selling vegetables.

“But then, I knew that for it to be a successful business, I needed to know how to run a farm business,” says Relyndis.

She attended the Emerging Farmers Conference and through that experience became aware of Big River Farms, where she eventually raised vegetables on a plot that was provided. She also took classes on such things as how to manage a high tunnel and basic farm business management. Finally, feeling confident that she could scale up her farm business, a few years ago Relyndis began looking for a farm outside the city.

After meeting Melissa at the Marbleseed Conference and touring Seven Songs a few times, Relyndis and Marius made it clear they were serious about buying the place. Besides being from Cameroon, one thing that sets the Tegomohs apart from the “typical” beginning farmer in the area is their age: Relyndis is 60 and Marius is 59, and they have three adult children. Relyndis acknowledges that she has fewer years ahead of her than behind, but approaches this new phase of her life with lots of infectious vigor.

“Even if I do it for just five years, and I die, I would have done what I wanted to do in life,” she says. “I don’t want to go and say, ‘What if?’ Just one day of farming is so satisfying that it makes up for 25 years of doing something I didn’t like.”

Driscoll and Hambidge are aware of how difficult it can be for a person of color to settle into a community mostly made up of white people, as Kenyon is. After the farm was sold, they invited their farm neighbors to meet the Tegomohs at a restaurant in the town. Relyndis says that community gathering helped — they’ve connected with a neighbor that provides manure for their composting system, and a corn-soybean farmer in the area notifies them when he’s going to spray.

“One neighbor promised me a cat,” says Relyndis with a smile. “I’m going to go get a kitten from them.”

Paper Preparation

Once the two parties decided to pursue the transition, they made constant communication a priority during the four-to-five-month period before the sale was finalized in January 2025. That became particularly important because the Tegomohs were utilizing a USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) Beginning Farmer Loan to help finance the purchase. Such loans are known for involving a labyrinth of paperwork and for taking a significant amount of time. The drawn-out process can be particularly difficult for beginning farmers who may be beaten to the punch by larger, more established farmers who have financial resources on-hand to buy up land. Driscoll and Hambidge had seen other transitions get stymied by the red tape-prone FSA loan process.

“We knew FSA would be slow, so that was helpful because we weren’t like, it has to happen immediately,” says Melissa. “We can wait — this is going to happen when it happens.”

One thing highlighted during LSP’s Farm Transition Planning Course is to make sure paperwork deadlines are met and that the seller and the buyer are both holding up their end of the bargain by providing information when it’s asked for. Relyndis concedes that “I just want to farm,” and that communication and paperwork are not her forte. But Marius excels at that sort of thing, and through her experience with the hair braiding business, Relyndis knew how to apply for credit. Hambidge has a background in the law, and Driscoll used to handle land appraisals for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, so they both had experience plowing through bureaucratic blizzards (they did hire an attorney to help with the legal portions of the transition process). Relyndis appreciated how prompt the sellers were when questions came up.

“One thing, Melissa and Jay, their paperwork was coming, they didn’t drag. Like if FSA would ask for something like a well water test result, they would produce it,” she says.

2 Families — 2 Directions

As she provides a brief tour of one of the farm’s high tunnels, Relyndis talks about her first growing season on the operation, which she has renamed Kisheri Farms; Kisheri means happiness/joy in Relyndis’s native language, Lamnso. She calls this her “learning year” and is excited to build on that experience in 2026. “Everything that could happen happened,” she says.

The Tegomohs had good success selling at the Mill City Farmers’ Market in Minneapolis, and they were able to take over the Seven Songs egg delivery business after Melissa shared her client list. They even got a chance to market vegetables through a farm to school contract and by selling wholesale to other vendors. But a hailstorm in September cut short their school sales and damaged both high tunnels on the farm, and for a time in 2025 Relyndis was dividing her time between managing plots at Big River, their home in Roseville, and the farm in Kenyon.

“It was a lot of driving,” she says.

She cultivated a wealth of knowledge during the 2025 growing season, and now feels confident enough to take steps such as hire help in 2026. Relyndis also has plans to add another high tunnel and to expand into the production of meat chickens. She and Marius are constantly pushing to lower the farm’s carbon footprint as much as possible. They are adopting tools and equipment that run on electricity and would like to put in a solar array eventually.

“We are trying our best to take care of the little parcel of Earth that we have, that we have been put in charge of, so we can contribute to what nature has already done, and the next generation,” says Relyndis. “I’m just full of energy, I want to get things done. There’s a lot to do.”

Such a stewardship mission is music to Driscoll and Hambidge’s ears. But the Tegomohs are taking steps to put their own unique stamp on Kisheri Farms as well. For example, after examining the finances of the egg business, Relyndis decided some adjustments needed to be made to the management of the chickens to make it more profitable. She is now relying more on restaurant scraps and spent grain from a brewery to feed the birds, and less on the expensive organic feed Driscoll and Hambidge used. Relyndis says the adjustment is working and has made the poultry enterprise on the farm more profitable and manageable.

Back in South Minneapolis, Driscoll and Hambidge are settling into a post-farming life. Jay loves his work as a youth counselor, and Melissa is volunteering with a local community garden that donates produce to a food shelf. She would like to eventually use her farming skills to support nonprofits that are working with beginning and emerging farmers. And she’s brought a little of the farm to the city. After a late summer rainstorm passes, Melissa and Jay show off a 40 x 50 plot behind the house growing an impressive variety of vegetables.

“People keep asking me, ‘Are you missing the farm?’ And you know, I think I was ready to leave it,” says Driscoll, adding that perhaps the hardest part of passing on the operation is realizing that the new owner won’t do everything exactly as she did it. “I’m like, ‘Step back, let it go, let it go.’ ”

♦ ♦ ♦

How-to: A Successful Transition

Every farm transition is unique, but the passing of the torch between Melissa Driscoll/Jay Hambidge and Relyndis and Marius Tegomoh offers some guidelines for a successful changing of hands:

1) Write It Down

Whether you are working with a commercial lender or the Farm Service Agency, good recordkeeping is crucial. Relyndis acknowledges that she hasn’t always been the best at keeping good financial records. But a few years ago, when she started thinking seriously about buying a farm, she decided to work on her weaknesses. She took classes and eventually enrolled in the Minnesota Farm Business Management Program, which provides enrollees access to an expert who will help them manage ag finances. While she farmed, Driscoll was also enrolled in that program, and says she found it a tremendous resource for managing finances and connecting with other resources.

“I think we’re extra fortunate that we met a farmer like Melissa who was also really good at keeping records, and was willing to share those records with us,” says Relyndis.

2) Communication, Communication, Communication

Many a farm transition has been derailed by lack of communication, or, in some cases, miscommunication, between the various parties involved, which includes not only the retiring farmers and beginning farmers, but lenders and any government agencies that might be part of the process. During the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Transition Planning Course, one presenter shared a story of how poor communication undermined her attempt to purchase a farming enterprise.

“That was super helpful to hear that,” says Hambidge. “It was just as important as the success stories. Because it showed how important it was to sit down and get clear right up front who we are and what we want.”

In the case of the Seven Songs-Kisheri transfer, both parties responded as quickly as possible when lenders asked for documentation. They were also willing to get on the phone or send a text when questions came up. “Whenever we were worried about something, we communicated, and they did too,” says Hambidge.

One thing that helped develop the kind of trust that smooths channels of communication was that early in the process, Melissa, Jay, Relyndis, and Marius sat down for a “get-to-know-you” meal at the farm. “The intention was, ‘Who are you, how do we share this process, and what do you care about, what do we care about? Why are we driven to do what we’re doing?’ ” says Hambidge.

3) Be Aware an Appraisal May Not Value Everything

Driscoll and Hambidge knew they had to have the farm appraised to satisfy lenders who may be lending money to the Tegomohs. What they learned was that ironically, the appraisal they had done didn’t put much value on infrastructure like a hoop house or greenhouse, or even that the land was certified organic. Those types of “add-ons” may be of value to a buyer, or in some cases they may just be pieces of infrastructure they’d rather not deal with. It turns out the Tegomohs were looking for such add-ons — they wanted to farm vegetables organically and sell direct to eaters, as well as via wholesale markets. What they didn’t want to do is take on the pesto business, which involves a fair amount of processing during a busy part of the growing season. In the end, the Tegomohs took over the egg business Sevens Songs had set up, but Driscoll and Hambidge sold the pesto enterprise to another local farmer.

4) Have a Backup Plan

Early on, the Tegomohs approached the USDA’s Farm Service Agency about borrowing money for the Seven Songs purchase. They also applied to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Down Payment Assistance Grant Program. But Relyndis says they didn’t go into the transition process assuming those avenues would work out. She and Marius had saved up money, and were willing to go to a commercial lender if need be, even with the higher interest rates that would come with such an option. In the end, the Down Payment Assistance Grant didn’t come through for them — since it was launched a few years ago as a result of efforts on the part of LSP and its allies, the demand for the program has far exceeded resources available. The Farm Service Agency process took several months, but the agency’s loan ended up covering 45% of the purchase price; Compeer Financial pitched in 50%, and the Tegomohs covered the remaining 5% with their own savings.

5) Do the Homework

Participants in LSP’s Farm Transition Planning Course find there is a fair amount of “homework” involved. This involves writing down what values drive you, as well as laying out goals for your farm and for your life once you leave the land. It can be tempting to skip such self-evaluation. Don’t, say Driscoll and Hambidge. They both maintain that it helped them clarify what kind of buyer they were looking for, as well as what kind of life they’d like to have post-farming. Such visioning can help show where a farming couple, for example, shares goals and visons, as well as where they may differ.

“That was super, super helpful to actually sit down and go through the homework stuff,” says Hambidge. “We’d set aside time where Melissa worked on her part of it and I worked on mine, and then we’d come back together to share.”

6) Know When to Step Away

Whether the transition is within or outside the family, it can be extremely difficult to turn over the reins of an operation one has spent years building up. Driscoll says she also had to accept that although the Tegomohs were interested in farming the way she and Hambidge had raised food, it was clear they needed to follow their own path. She’s willing to help out when they ask for it, but doesn’t want to be overbearing. Relyndis, for her part, says she felt that especially during her first growing season on the farm she needed to “get to know the land” and learn things the hard way. When the farm suffered a major hailstorm in September, Relyndis called Melissa to share the news with someone who knows that nature can throw a curve ball at farming occasionally. Jay and Melissa came out to the farm to teach the Tegomohs how to put new plastic on the high tunnels, which were damaged by the hail. But as far as the overall growing season is concerned, the Tegomohs wanted to get a feel for the farm on their own.

“And if I had let her, she would have been here to help,” says Relyndis. “But I needed to experience the things that a lot of handholding would not have helped with.”

On the other hand, the farmer can’t wait to learn from Driscoll how to use a seeder that Relyndis bought from her. “She swears it will make my life easier. I trust her.”

LSP managing editor Brian DeVore edits the Land Stewardship Letter and produces the Ear to the Ground podcast.