Reinventing the farm can feel like a concept that’s being pushed down the throat of today’s agriculture. Instead let’s call it what it really is: “reinventing the farmer.”
Change is never simple on the farm. It’s so much easier to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them than adopt something new.
“Easier, and safer, too” is the phrase in the back of my mind as I write this, and I expect it’s in the back of yours, too.
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But then, we also know about farms that don’t change … we’ve all seen examples.
Let me hasten to say up front that I am continuously blown away by the pace of technological change on today’s farms. Cumulatively, how many hours do farmers spend setting up and managing new electronic systems on today’s equipment?
That, though, isn’t really the kind of change I want to talk about.
Here’s one — and as always, it’s inside the farmer’s head, not under the hood. On more and more farms, a big part of the pride that the farm leader experiences comes from seeing everyone associated with the farm growing and utilizing their full potential.
Some readers will think I’ve been swallowing too much HR-speak. I worry about that, too. I’m always leery of squidgy thinking.
So look again at the farms you know, or flip through the pages of Country Guide. The professionalization of agriculture isn’t restricted to the farm manager level, it’s all the way up and down, and it’s succeeding because the farmer is intentional about driving it. Is it happening on your farm? I bet it is, and I also bet that you see it happening more and more in future.
We keep saying that the core values of farming don’t change, but the way those values are expressed certainly does.
When so many farm leaders began a decade or two ago to talk about farmers as CEOs, we were all thinking of contexts like the farmer talking to the bank, or telling which employee to spray which field instead of doing it themselves.
We had no idea they meant CEOs as team leaders.
Nor did we know that one of the great changes in store for the farm is that farmers would begin spending a chunk less of their time on solving problems and devote it instead to spotting and responding to opportunities.
That doesn’t mean all farmers are knee-deep in diversification planning. But it does mean that, more than ever, they are alive to opportunity across all categories, and the people they deal with know it too.
Again, the pages of Country Guide are a testament to this, but so are farms in every neighbourhood across the country.
We have so few words to describe change. We might say a change made a big difference, or if we’re trying to impress ourselves, we might say it’s evolutionary or transformative.
But again and again across this country, I simply say, “It’s a different farm.”
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
