“Most bad decisions get made in good times.” We’ve all heard it, and most of us have said it.
Except I’m not sure I believe it.
I see precious little indication that farmers have been making bad decisions during the past five years. At Country Guide, we’ve been keeping our eyes open for signs of flawed decision-making, not so much because we’re looking for something sensationalistic to write about as because, like you, we’ve been fascinated by the transformation of agriculture since the millennium.
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We agree too that if there’s something that agriculture is generally bad at, it’s talking about failure, so if there is wide-scale failure looming on the horizon, we should be seeking it out, holding it up to the light and studying it.
But I see no evidence of it. I’ll trust you to let me know if you disagree, because I do sometimes hear from worried farmers and from farm accountants who fear, for instance, that too many farmers have invested too heavily in machinery, or that instead of paying down debt in the last five years they have been lured into paying top-of-the-market land prices.
There undoubtedly is some of this going on, but what I mainly see is a generation of farmers who have a very shrewd idea of what they can afford and what they can’t, and who have added impressively to their sustainability through the recent bull market.
That sustainability doesn’t mean that our farm sector is going to stop evolving, however. Instead, because we have a cadre of farmers with resources to invest, and with more sophisticated financial skills than ever before, this evolution has already been set in motion. We just haven’t really seen it yet.
The difference this time is, our evolution isn’t being driven because other farms are falling by the wayside. While that may have accounted for a good bit of agriculture’s evolution in the last 40 years, today it is being driven by farms that don’t just make good decisions. They make great ones.
When Cornell University’s Bob Milligan told associate editor Maggie Van Camp this issue that “The progression from worker to manager to leader is the new challenge for farms,” I found myself nodding, and I think you will too.
The more I ponder it, the more I agree. Every neighbourhood I know has a small handful of farms that are staggeringly capable, and that are fired with a deep desire to grow.
That doesn’t mean I think there will be five One Earths farming all of Canada. But it does mean that the idea from the 1990s that agriculture is becoming doughnut-shaped, and you either have to be very big, or very intensive, is likely to return. In a way, it’s what this issue of leadership is all about. Are we getting it right? Send me an email and let me know.
