Farming isn’t a business. Oh no, hold on just a minute! Of course it’s a business. How could Country Guide ever say it isn’t?
Ask any farmer what’s on their “must do” list for 2022. Right at the top will be production. It has to be. Farming is all about producing more, producing more efficiently, and producing more consistently.
Theoretically it might be possible to do that without leaving the office, but that isn’t the world that any farmer I know actually lives in.
Read Also
Editor’s Note: No pressure
What is your playbook going into this year’s crop? Not an easy question to answer right now, given the global…
I often think back to an interview we did a number of years ago with Henry Mintzberg, the McGill professor who had a better claim than virtually anyone to being Canada’s top business expert.
We asked him about farming, and among the first things he said was, “People keep saying it’s a business, but it’s a calling.”
Mintzberg was a business prof, but he spent much of his career saying that business needs to know its place.
I’ve gone back to our article. Here’s how he explained his thinking. “We’re living in a time when it seems nothing but business matters. Art, health care, everything is made into a business. I think that’s a mistake.
“Seeing farming as only a business is probably a mistake too.”
The danger, he said, is that when the leadership of a farm or any other business gets too divorced from the day-to-day world of producing, they fall into a fatal pattern of making decisions by decree instead of by observation. “Being an engaged leader,” he said, “means you must be reflective while staying in the fray — the world of management.”
Does his advice still hold?
The only response seems to be that the advice is the same, but farming is different. Farmers today must be more interested in creating the place where productivity can happen. How can it be wrong to put real time and real effort into expansion or incorporation, or into your financial management or HR?
I only raise this now, at the start of another year, because farmers have to be so much more sophisticated than we thought back in 2012 when we talked to Mintzberg.
The stories in this issue are only a beginning. If you haven’t been reading April Stewart’s book reports, begin right there with her review of the very Mintzbergian book Grit. Then keep reading, including The Question for 2022 and Corporate DEI. It’s becoming clearer that while many of us thought our goals are to make agriculture equal for women and to make it more diverse, the real goal has to be to make it more equitable.
Farmers must be producers, of course. But increasingly, they must also produce the producers on their farms, which means knowing their people as well as they know their crops.
If this sounds idealistic, that’s our fault. Farmers, as we are always seeing, are smart people making smart decisions.
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
