Leadership isn’t giving orders.
While Dan Mazier has an impressive track record of farm and community leadership — a record that he’s continuing to grow — he also sees a next great leadership challenge for today’s farms. Can you build a farm that you can sell for its business value, not just its asset value? Mazier wants to answer that question with a, “Here’s how.”
There’s no way you can know everything all the time.
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Within a decade, Stan Eby led Canada’s beef industry through two of its gravest trials, the Walkerton crisis and BSE. One of the key lessons, he now says, is that within any group of leaders, there’s a subgroup that shows true leadership. Your goal, he says, is to find those true leaders, and then to build your loyalty to them, and their loyalty to you.
I still believe in farming being done by farmers
To lead their farms, farmers must lead agriculture, Pellerin says. That means they must believe in united action, farm organizations and even, in many cases, marketing boards. Without united action, Pellerin says, farmers won’t be able to control their own destinies. Instead, that power will go to governments and corporations.
I am a better husband, better father and friend, a better person in my community.
And a better farmer too, Trinke says. Farmers are bioengineered to soak up leadership skills from their parents. So is there any point to farmers taking leadership courses? Trinke is convinced there is. After taking the Leaders in Growth program, Trinke is working with the Farm Leadership Council to offer that program and others to more farmers across the West, and he hopes across Canada too.
You give your time to these organizations — and it does take quite a bit of time — so you have to get something back.
Leadership pays for itself, says grain and oilseed grower Steve Vandervalk. Serving on farm organizations means Vandervalk spends valuable time away from his farm, he agrees, but the contact with other farmers and ag leaders also energizes him and equips him with new ideas so he can farm smarter when he gets back.
We build these businesses, then at the end of the day, we sell them for the price of the assets.
Leadership, says Menzies, is “people following you and taking your vision or idea beyond where you alone could take it.” At Saskatchewan’s Wigmore Farms, it’s the fuel that drives the business. Without Menzies’ belief in leadership, the company could never have transformed itself from a typical farm into a 37,000-acre diversified farm business in just four years.
