In a hotel ballroom in Saskatoon, farmers and farm advisors are listening to the speakers at a conference called Balancing the Bottom Line.
The conference has been organized by the Farm Leadership Council, a wing of Viterra, Canada s largest ag corporation. It s also organized by the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, a farm policy group that got its start with the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities and which advocates not just for farmers, but for healthy rural communities too.
Plus the conference is organized too by the Canadian Association of Farm Advisors, whose members include bankers, accountants, succession advisors and many others, each of them with an interest in getting more business into their offices.
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It s a tangle of potential conflicts. But there is a lot of relevant information too. These speakers are good, talking about real issues, both local and global, affecting all producers on their farms.
Many of the speakers are at the top of their professions too, people most farmers would never otherwise have access to. But that means they re also leaders of their own businesses or departments, with potential agendas that this audience could never guess at.
Is the whole experience tainted?
Leadership in agriculture is a challenge. Asked to define it, most of us start by listing all the various forms of leadership required in an industry that demands a ridiculous breadth of skills and knowledge. But an outright definition of leadership eludes us.
Sometimes, what also eludes us is where leadership comes from. Maybe it s genetic. Some people seem to be born leaders. Or maybe it s something we can learn, apprentice-like by watching our parents or maybe in a more school-like way, with courses and seminars.
The Farm Leadership Council (FLC) knows where it stands. Leadership is a function of education, it believes. This is definitely an organization that subscribes to the leaders are not born, they are made theory.
We bring leadership, education and business skills to the farm at the producer level, says Linda Pipke, executive director of the council, a western Canadian producer organization founded in 2005 and funded by Viterra, and which today boasts an impressive 50,000 active members.
Pipke too hesitates to define leadership, instead recognizing it means different things to different people and for different reasons.
But Pipke does believe there is a blend of educational tools that FLC can use to help its producers develop their leadership capabilities.
As a result, FLC is on a mission to make practical, everyday, bottom line kinds of training available to
