Two Ontario Dairy Farmers Share Hard-Won Lessons on Farm Succession

A handshake deal and a vendor take-back put cows back in the barn just 11 months after a 2013 fire destroyed every building and animal at Markvale Holsteins. That recovery story anchored one of two firsthand succession accounts delivered Tuesday, March 31, at the 2026 Canadian Dairy Business Summit in Stratford, Ontario, ahead of the Canadian Dairy XPO, which ran April 1–2.

Paul MacLeod of Darcroft Farms near Embro, Ontario, and Clarence Markus of Markvale Holsteins near Beachville, Ontario, walked summit host Dan Mathieson and attendees through the deals, tax traps and family negotiations behind their completed succession plans. They shared the panel with Bertram von Czettritz, a farm succession specialist from Germany, and MNP's Kurt Oelschlagel, a tax partner, and Larry Batte, a farm succession specialist.

Few subjects generate as much anxiety on the farm. Succession talks are avoided or delayed by many producers — not for lack of advisers, but because the process runs through emotions, family loyalties and a need for fairness.

Why shares beat buying the tractor?

MacLeod's family frames succession as "business development," not transition. They deal in shares. That single structural choice, he argued, removes the emotional weight that stalls most farm deals.

"When you're buying somebody's farm, when you're splitting up or you're buying a car or a tractor, sometimes there's an attachment to that," MacLeod said. "When you're buying shares, there's not much emotional attachment."

The numbers behind the operation are concrete. The family started near Niagara Falls in 1951, grew to 60 head between 1983 and 2016 near Woodstock, and now milks 120 head with plans to buy more quota and build a new heifer barn and storage space later this summer. MacLeod and his wife, Ellen, raised three children — Jessica, Jared and Kyle — and Kyle now owns part of the farm.

What derailed their first share transfer?

Citizenship. In 1998, MacLeod and Ellen, a U.S. citizen, decided their three children should also be Americans. Ellen became a Canadian citizen in 2001. In 2020, the family wanted to start transferring shares to Kyle but could not: Ellen's U.S. citizenship, shared by all three children, created tax implications — especially given the farm's value in the U.S. The process stopped. After spending considerable money to correct the issue, Kyle and Ellen renounced their U.S. citizenship.

"Like I say, ours is a journey," MacLeod said. "It's always been business development and it's the way we've looked at it."

How did a fire rebuild a farm in 11 months?

Markus's family history stretches back to 1951, when his parents emigrated from the Netherlands and began working on a farm near Chatham, Ontario. In a twist, the owners left that same year to attend the International Plowing Match in Woodstock — and it was that Plowing Match site Markus's parents purchased 16 years later. They bought Cambridge Farms in 1954, sold it 13 years on, and in 1972 purchased another dairy operation with 228 acres. In 1984, Markus married Wendy and the two took over Markvale Holsteins.

The family's core lessons came early: cash flow is king, and relationships require repair. "From my mom, it was about life skills, the core values of God, trust and the power of forgiveness," Markus said. "She would pull me aside when I had a spat with Dad – or the other way around – and say, 'It's up to you to fix it. You're going to have to cross the bridge in order to fix the relationship, because we know Dad's probably not going to do it.'"

Then came the losses. His mother died in 1999, holding 39 kilograms of quota, which Markus and his older brother, John, split evenly. In 2013, fire took all the buildings and cattle at the home farm. Markus set a goal of milking cows again within roughly 11 months. A farmer from Milton, Ontario, offered to sell him his cows.

"On a handshake deal and on a vendor take-back, we were able to milk those cows and 11 months later, they were on the farm and that relationship has continued to this day," Markus said.

What holds a four-family operation together?

All four Markus children run dairy operations of their own: Daryl and Sarah at Markridge Holsteins, Gary and Hilary at Markhill Holsteins, Mark and Willeke at Markvale Holsteins, and Michelle and her husband, Mike, at Four Daughters Dairy. Markus and Wendy financed their children's aspirations through multiple land and quota purchases and building renovations — settling who owed what at year-end without chasing the last dollar.

"Between us, there was a trust factor that always existed," Markus said. The pattern now extends to a custom business run by another family branch, with seven cousins paying bills twice a year.

In 2019, he and Wendy moved from a partnership to a corporation — a two-and-a-half-year process that ended with Mark and Willeke taking control of Markvale Holsteins in 2023. Wendy passed away in September 2025, on the couple's 41st anniversary.

"This is not my story – this is our story, together," Markus said. "I'm standing here but overall it's our story and she took care of the kids and she was the reinforcing side of our vision. If there's no other message that I got through today, it's this one line: Succession planning never starts too early."

For producers weighing their own transitions, the panel's evidence points one direction: structure the deal in shares, fix the tax and citizenship questions before they block a transfer, and start earlier than feels necessary.