How best can I serve today’s young farmers?
For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about farm business decision making. A lot. I work with farmers of various ages and stages to help them make the best decisions they can. Decisions that take them towards their end goal, not away from it. This is no mean feat amidst a backdrop of complex and multiple demands. Many of these demands are time bound and influenced by factors beyond one’s control and events that are yet to occur. Weather, commodity pricing, government policy to name a few.
In recent conversations with farmers under 40, the pressure of decision making amongst uncertainty was very evident. These businesses are profitable and strong. Yet their decision makers feel stretched and stressed.
They have young families and are busy literally 24-7. The perceived pressure they feel to honour the accumulated legacy of previous generations is a powerful and unsettling force. No one wants to be the generation that loses the family farm (rare but dreaded occurrence). No one likes making visible mistakes in paddocks on the highway for all the neighbour’s to see. There is a strong desire to be viewed as a good farmer by neighbour’s and elders. It’s the ultimate compliment. The fear of failing is strong.
These conversations got me thinking. How best can I serve these young gun farmers? Men and women with sharp minds and a get stuff done attitude. Many with tertiary education. They are capable critical thinkers and compliment the practical and intuitive skills of those who did their training on the job.
At the moment, these farmers are trying to best estimate the grain yield they may harvest in six months’ time so they can decide how much Nitrogen fertilizer to apply. How can I best help them do this and compliment the help they get from other sources such as their farm agronomist or their local peer support group.
Would I best be serving them by identifying the most useful online decision support tools for climate forecasting and yield potential calculation? Useful information indeed.
Would I best serve them by collating the outputs of these links in a series of graphs they could look up and use to guide their choices? Again, useful to a point but not useful without their farm context and possibly misleading.
Or could I teach them how to notice more about themselves and those they work with and the human factors that influences the choices they make? I could provide examples and evidence of how the quality of information they use affects the quality of the decision they make.
I could introduce them to various biases we humans are prone to so they can recognize the biases they might be susceptible to when stressed, tired and under pressure.
These skills will help them know when to employ some thoughtful analytics before making a decision with a million-dollar consequence.
They will recognize when being roughly right and on time or before time is more important than precisely right but too late.
I hope to serve these young farmers and serve them well by sharing insights about self-awareness, information quality and decision making bias. I hope these insights enhance their quest to run profitable robust businesses, be thriving rather than just surviving and grow the legacy of their forebears for the generations yet to come. I hope to contribute to their peace of mind.
Stay safe. Farm well.