The word “entitlement” gets tossed around a lot in agriculture. “Oh,” somebody has always said, “the kids act like they’re entitled to the best truck money can buy.” Or, “Oh, he acts like he’s so entitled to a voice in how this farm is run.”
In 2023, we’re sensing the entitlement charge is getting bigger and closer, and 2024 is shaping up the same.
Well, our experience tells us the real test has a lot more to do with what you do with a thing once you’ve got it than with whether you did or didn’t deserve to get a taste of it in the first place.
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The world, after all, has a way of taking care of people who don’t respect what they’ve been given, especially what they’ve been given in their business lives and in their careers.
Which, of course, isn’t news to anyone on the farm.
And if anyone keeps asking whether today’s farms deserve their healthier net worths, maybe we should answer their question with a question of our own. What would rural Canada and our agriculture industry look like today if we were still in the middle of the farm depression that pounded the sector in the 1980s and 1990s?
Or turn the question around. I’m surely not the only one who has sometimes wondered what would be different in today’s countryside if the demand-led farm economy and the gains in farmland pricing that we’ve seen in the past decade had actually come together in those gloomier days 40 years or more ago, when there were so many more farms in Canada and so many more vital communities.
Give it some thought the next time you’ve got a long drive ahead of you. Or maybe just drop a hint about it when you’re together for coffee and see if it gets anything churning in anyone else.
Be realistic about it. Work it out step by step, even make a sort of board game out of it, if that helps, because not everything would turn out positive, and not everything would come together the way somebody with a grand plan would want it to.
In agriculture, there’s no getting around the fact that we have to be interested not only in what is good for an individual farm, but what is good for farming and for the country.
By the way, if you do put some thought into this, send me a note at my email address below. I’d be very interested in where it leads.
But let’s put that aside for a moment and ask if there is any evidence that farmers’ increased equity and their financial capability is being somehow misused. Isn’t that what we would mean if we said it wasn’t deserved?
I see little serious sign myself. Instead, I see a lot more farms who agree with Jake Lequee in our December issue’s story “Opportunities ahead” by associate editor April Stewart. They see access to working capital as the most important financial tool for today’s farms.
I also recommend associate editor Leeann Minogue’s piece “Measuring success on the farm,” where she looks at how to assess your progress on essential but non-financial success factors.
We are on the cusp of an era of great pivots. But farmers are in charge, as they deserve to be.
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
