Let me start with a complaint, just because the scene I’m going to describe is so fresh in my mind and it was so galling.
I was in a meeting and the people I was meeting weren’t neophytes. They know something about agriculture, or at least they say they do. In fact, they’re already making decisions for companies doing significant ag business.
And it’s clear they think farmers don’t put any more thought into farming than it takes to put a seed in the ground and hope that somehow it comes to harvest.
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I won’t share their names. It wouldn’t be fair because, after all, it isn’t as if they’re at all unusual. I’d essentially be picking on them for a fault that is shared by so many others.
But it does make me think about the tremendous inefficiency there is in the system, when so few decision makers understand that farmers have the smarts and knowledge to be effective partners, not just commodity suppliers.
They have the same challenge I do, but we have exactly opposite ideas about it. We both are talking to farmers. But they spend all their time trying to simplify their messages while I — as I’ve said before, and I’m sure will say again — find that the hardest part of my job is sourcing writers who can meet the minimum standards of knowledge and insight required to deliver something worth reading to today’s farm audience.
This is at least as true for business management on the farm as it is for field or animal management.
What’s interesting to me is that with this issue of Country Guide, as with so many previous issues, we didn’t set out to put together a special on education or on skills management on the farm, but this is effectively what we have done.
What happened, instead, is that we went to farms across the country, and we listened.
Ask any lawyer, banker or accountant. They will tell you that farmers have not only gained incredible business literacy in the last 10 years, they have adopted an attitude of continuous learning toward it.
Now it’s the “experts” who have the challenge of keeping up with the farmers — which is as it should be.
Unfortunately, few outside of agriculture will read the features in this issue and see how each one portrays an agriculture that is firing on all cylinders, including on business management.
It used to be that farmers would laugh at how non-farmers get left behind by farm talk, and how, for instance, they’re flummoxed when farmers talk about forages or inoculants or any of a hundred other technologies.
But now, if two farmers are chatting in a city elevator, the non-farmers are as likely to be left behind by the business talk. What percentage of Canadians, I wonder, could understand more than the first sentence of Maggie Van Camp’s excellent story of farm corporations in our May/June issue?
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
