I admit I can hardly believe it. When I first signed on with Country Guide more than a decade ago, I used this space to ask a question that I honestly wondered about.
The question? Can farmers grow their business productivity as fast as their crop yields?
In fact, farmers have grown their professionalism at a fantastic pace, faster than anything we’ve seen from plant breeders or machinery engineers, impressive though our scientific and technological progress has certainly been.
Read Also
Encouraging people from outside agriculture to come on in
In part three of our Making the Future series, Country Guide spoke with Emily McGovern from South Surrey, B.C. (Read…
This matters because the decision-making power of the individual farmer is the force that drives agriculture. Who else is finding the resources to put new technologies to work? Who else is building strategies to keep the farm sustainable?
What does it mean to say farmers are more professional, and they’re making better decisions? On the brink of summer, let me list a few things I’ve observed.
First, effective decision-making takes courage. In fact, it takes what you might call 360 degree courage, something that I don’t have to define for Country Guide readers to know what I mean.
Increasingly, great decisions also require great powers of what I have come to call synthesis. Analytical capabilities are needed of course. In fact, they’re needed more than ever, but today’s farmer also needs the kind of mind that can simultaneously put multiple factors in the same frame and anticipate how to leverage the parts so, incredibly, the whole not only works, it pays.
Yet I also have great admiration for the ability of farmers to stagger and pace their decisions.
This, I think, is largely why economists routinely find that when a farm adopts and lives by a business plan, it gets more successful.
I’m not in the group that says every farm must have a formal business plan, although I have trouble imagining a farm where a business plan wouldn’t help, unless it’s the kind of farm where the plan would sit on a shelf and never get cracked. If it does get used, a business plan braids myriad objectives together and can only help ensure the right amount of progress is made on the right objectives in the right timeframe.
But let me get back on track. This ability of farmers to pace their decision-making is one of the things that non-farmers just do not know about agriculture, yet is pivotal to the performance of our farms. And, honestly, it’s such a pleasure to behold.
There are, of course, other keys to professional decision-making too, including a commitment to continual learning, disciplined cost management, an understanding of risk, and a knowledge of financial capability.
You’ll find Country Guide discussing many of these strengths throughout the stories in our April 2024 issue. Or maybe I should say “especially” throughout these stories, because perhaps the clearest sign of the professionalism of today’s agriculture is the way today’s farms use the summer months to advance their business agendas. Are we — and they — getting it right?
Let me know. I’m at [email protected].
