No one seemed to need one before, but now they say a vision statement can be good for the farm. Dale isn’t sure. Even Donna isn’t convinced, but the kids are already talking...
It was only mid-morning when Jeff and Elaine walked across the farmyard to his parents’ house, but his Mom and Dad already looked exhausted.
“We thought you’d never get here,” his dad Dale said with an exaggerated sigh of relief.
“Sorry,” Elaine said, setting her laptop down in the kitchen. “We thought about picking him up when we got back last night, but it was already nine when we got home from the city, and we knew he’d be asleep.”
“Don’t listen to Dale,” Donna said as she hurried to gather up the toys strewn around the kitchen table. “We can manage a two-year old for two days.”
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“Sure you can,” commented Dale’s father Ed from his usual coffee-time seat at the far end of the table. “That’s why your house looks a tornado’s roared through.”
The toddler heard his mother’s voice and came running out of the living room for a hug. On his way he dropped the two toys he’d been carrying, so Donna bent to pick those up too. “Did you have a good trip?”
“It was the Crop Production show, Donna. Saskatoon in January isn’t exactly a beach vacation,” Dale said.
“It was nice to get away for a few days,” Elaine told her father-in-law.
Donna nodded. “Sometimes you need to get some distance from the farm to get a new perspective.”
“We got that alright,” Jeff said, excited to tell his parents about what he’d learned. “I ran into lots of the guys I went to university with. Some of them had some good ideas. That’s the real reason we didn’t come by last night. One of the guys told us about some online videos. When Elaine and I started checking them out, we couldn’t stop watching.”
“You abandoned your kid to watch dirty videos?” Ed said. “And you’re telling your mother about it?”
Jeff rolled his eyes and explained that they’d been watching videos — “webinars” — posted by the Canadian Farm Business Management Council on their www.farmcentre.com website.
“It was the first we’d heard of them,” Elaine said. “But we really liked the one Jeff’s friend recommended. It was about vision and goal setting.”
“Visions,” Ed chuckled to himself. “This is going to be good. Any more coffee, Donna?”
Donna stepped around more stray toys to pour coffee while the family settled around the table.
Jeff ignored his grandfather. “Remember that guy from Biggar I lived with when I was in university? He farms with his father and his sister. He said they started putting their plans down on paper a couple of years ago, and it’s made it way easier for all of them to make decisions together.”
But Dale wasn’t much more enthusiastic than his father. “I went to one of those business planning workshops a few years ago. It was like a two-hour grammar lesson. ‘Always use the present tense.’ ‘Don’t forget to use active verbs.’ By the end of the workshop I wasn’t sure if I was running a farm or grading high-school English papers.”
“We don’t have to get hung up on the wording,” Elaine said. “That’s not the important thing. The idea is to figure out where we want the farm to be in the future.”
“We don’t need paper and a pen to do that. I’ll tell you right now,” Dale said. “We want our farm to be making more money.”
“She’s got a point, Dale” Donna told her husband. “There’s more than one way to make money on a farm.”
“Exactly!” Elaine said. “That’s the point of a vision statement. We need to make sure we all agree on exactly what business we’re in. So we can focus on the same goal.”
“After watching this kid of yours this morning, I’m thinking it’s the zoo-keeping business,” Ed said. “Add a giraffe, and we can sell tickets.”
The rest of the family pretended not to have heard that, but the toddler started banging loudly on a xylophone in the next room, and Ed nodded sagely, as if to say his case was closed.
“I don’t know,” Dale said. “There’s a real danger in getting too tied up in a vision. What if we decide our main goal is to buy more land? We could set aside cash to buy land for years and wind up missing a really good deal on a new combine. And what if no good land comes up for sale in the meantime? Or say we do buy more land, and we’re so busy hustling around at harvest time that we don’t have time to deal with six little plots of new pedigreed seed varieties? We always have to be flexible. Ready to take advantage of opportunities. Not fixed on one thing that might not work out.”
“Sure Dad,” Jeff agreed. “Of course we have to be flexible. But don’t you think we’d be better off starting with a plan, and adjusting it when our situation changes? If we don’t know where we’re trying to go, how will know when we get there?”
Dale still wasn’t on side. “This is all easy to say if you live near Biggar. But I had a vision last spring. A vision of golden fields of wheat blowing in the wind. But instead we had 4,000 acres under a foot of water at seeding time. I don’t see how writing down a bunch of goals could’ve helped that.”
“Nobody’s saying we can change the weather,” Jeff said. “But if we’d talked more about our long-term plans in advance, it might’ve helped us decide how much of our dry land to seed to pedigreed seed. We were making some pretty fast choices on the fly last spring.”
“I suppose,” Dale admitted grudgingly.
“It doesn’t need to be complicated,” Elaine said. “We can just talk about our vision, and then just draft a few personal goals for each of us to help make the vision come true. That’s what the business management specialist, Michelle Painchaud, says in the video. ‘A vision without an action plan is just a hallucination.’”
“My goal is to find out that this whole discussion has just been a hallucination,” Ed grumbled.
“We could start with something simple,” Jeff suggested. “Like… Hanson Acres is continuing the family tradition of optimizing inputs to produce grains and oilseeds.”
Ed had the first question. “What about lentils? Aren’t we going to plant lentils? Your seed customers are always calling up to ask about lentils.”
Dale had a comment too: “That doesn’t say anything about whether or not we’re going to try to expand our pedigreed seed business.”
And then Donna spoke up. “We’re not going to stop taking care of the soil, even if using the right rotations sometimes means a bit less profit in the short run.”
These complaints made Elaine smile as she opened her laptop. “See? We’re already having a good conversation about our vision. And we’re just getting started. Roll up your sleeves. Michelle Painchaud says the vision is the easy part. Wait until you see the video.”
“I’m definitely going to need more coffee,” Ed said, shaking his head. “And somebody better get that xylophone away from kid or I’m going to need a lobotomy too.” CG
