Traits of Exceptional Farm Managers

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. There are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that have not been widely shared. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to to achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. These concepts and principles about regenerative systems can be applied anywhere and when they're properly applied, they will increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics of ideas that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me. JohnGenerativeAgriculturePodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. This episode was originally recorded as a webinar, which is why you might notice audio quality is a bit lower. Growers expressed a lot of appreciation for the observations I shared, which is why I also wanted to share it with you here on the podcast.

Well, good evening friends. Thank you for joining us. I will be talking about a slightly different topic from those that I normally speak of, where I'm normally talking about agronomics. A number of growers have asked me to repeat a presentation that I first talked about at the World Ag Expo a couple of years ago where I was asked to talk about the characteristics of exceptional farm managers and separates those farm managers who have an exceptional degree of success. The context, the history behind this is in some of the work that we've done at advancing eco agriculture. When we first started with our initial consulting work and then started product development work, one of our practices was that every year at the end of a growing season, we would sit down with all of our consultants around the table and we would rank the success, not in terms of necessarily in terms of the grower's management success or financial success or anything like that. But more specifically, in terms of their agronomic success, how successful were we in producing the yield levels that we thought should be possible? And what was working, what was not working? It's a very fascinating exercise. So we would rank the agronomic performance of the crops that we were working with on a scale of 1 to 10, and then we would group the nines and tens together, the ones and twos together, and we would ask, what are the similarities between the nines and tens? What characteristics do these farm managers share in common that are quite different from the rest, most of the rest of the group? And similarly with the ones and twos, what are the common characteristics amongst those farms that are not enjoying the level of success? So this was a fascinating exercise. And we repeated the same exercise year after year after year, and we learned an awful lot. We learned a lot about agronomy, if I recall correctly, it was 2011 or 12 where we realized that all of the growers, or most of the growers in the number one and number two category, who were not enjoying the degree of agronomic success that we thought should be possible, were making foliar applications with poor quality water. And so that was kind of our first revelation of how extremely important water quality is for foliar applications of nutrients. However, over the last four years that we have repeated this exercise, all of a sudden, the differences that started showing up were no longer differences about agronomics. They were no longer differences, for example, using hard water or poor quality water for foliar applications. Instead, the differences that started showing up were differences in the management characteristics of how were growers managing their operation. So we developed a group of core characteristics that describe this group of very successful farm managers. Things happen to these growers as well, environment and climate impacts that are beyond their control. But consistently side by side, when compared with growers growing the exact same crops, the exact same neighborhood, they consistently outperform those growers. What are the characteristics that those growers share and why does that happen? Well, perhaps one of the biggest pieces that really stood out was how they thought about money and the finances on their farm and, and how that influenced their behavior and their priorities, because they prioritized their personal time and energy and the things they learned about completely differently based on their interactions with money and how they thought about managing money and managing the finances on the farm. Obviously, as we know, agriculture and farming is a challenging profession for most of the crops that we're growing. We're talking about very large volumes, very tight margins. There's not a lot of room to wiggle margin wise, and we need to manage costs very carefully. But we observed that there was a strong polarity in the way that they thought about managing their farm's balance sheet. If you want to balance a budget on any enterprise, then you have two major categories that you can play with. You can focus on increasing revenues, or you can focus on reducing costs. And obviously the agriculture environment, you can't ignore either of those. You have to pay close attention to costs. You have to pay very close attention to revenues. But we discovered the most successful farm managers thought about these two categories completely differently from most of the growers that we were working with. Most growers became personally engaged and spent a lot of their personal time and personal energy managing costs. They focus very heavily on the cost side of the budget and reducing costs, reducing inputs. They made that their personal responsibility. From a financial perspective, that is where they spent perhaps 80% of their personal focus on the financial spectrum. Increasing revenues is an area that the less successful farm managers spent a little bit of time on. But in this area, they would delegate a lot. So they would delegate to crop consultants and to veterinarians, to agronomists, to make recommendations for what nutrients to be applied or what cover crops to be planted, or whatever the case might be, to look at various tools and practices that they might be able to use to increase revenue. So they would invest personally, perhaps 20% of their own time and energy focusing on increasing revenue, and 80% of their personal energy on reducing cost. This was in stark contrast to the most successful growers. The most successful growers would do the exact opposite. Managing cost. They would delegate that to their accountants, to their farm managers. They didn't ignore it. They still stayed on top of it. They still paid close attention. They made sure that they were on track, but they delegated most of the responsibility and the priorities. But on the side of increasing revenue, they made sure that they understood how to increase revenue on the farm personally very deeply. They absolutely categorically refused to delegate that responsibility to anyone else. In fact, this was so pronounced. I think this is a characteristic that's worth talking about for a little bit for every crop. Even if you're growing a commodity crop like corn or soybeans, there are always a number of key pieces that directly affect revenue. If you are growing blueberries, for example, then the value of your blueberry crop, particularly if you are shipping it for an extended distance, is based on size and firmness in some parts of the country. And you get premiums for Firmness. If you're growing wheat, for example, you get premiums in many parts of the country for producing higher protein content wheat. With commodity crops such as corn, you get premiums for producing high test weight corn, or in some cases on soybeans, high oil content. My point is simply that for most crops, the there are key quality characteristics that bring a premium, either directly or indirectly. The question these very successful growers ask themselves is how do I make money with this crop? They understand these quality characteristics, whether it's increased firmness, increased protein content, increased test weight, whatever the characteristic might be, and they make certain that they personally know and understand that specific characteristic vary deeply. They do not delegate that to anyone else. They don't delegate that knowledge to a consultant or an agronomist or an advisor. They certainly have consultants and agronomists and advisors and people on their team that they work with. But they want to make sure that they understand that specific piece personally. So in terms of the economics and the finances of their farm, the most successful growers spend roughly 20% of their personal energy thinking about reducing costs, and 80% of their time and energy thinking about how to increase revenue. They delegate most of the cost side and they personally take responsibility for the revenue side. This is in exact opposite to the less successful growers. So this was one that really stood out very, very strongly. The second piece that really stood out was the difference in implementation and execution. The most successful farm managers demanded perfect implementation and execution from themselves and also from their employees. And obviously talking about an industry where things always go wrong. But when it came to developing infrastructure on a farm, trellising trees, putting up a hoop house, putting on a foliar application, setting pipe for eri, whatever activity was needed or necessary, they expected perfect execution. The rows needed to be perfectly straight or perfectly on contour. They demanded the best of execution both of themselves and of their employees. Another difference was their planning for the future of their operation and the things that they wanted to be working on. So the most successful managers we saw consistently would be thinking into the future and about projects that they wanted to work on in the future. So what a new type of trellising and managing trees might look like in the future, or new varieties for a crop that they're growing, like strawberries or tomatoes and or new types of growing systems. So they're constantly looking for new technology, new ideas, and they're thinking about where the industry that they are in is going to be in in three to five years from now or longer. So they're Thinking into the future more longer term, and generally, we find that the less successful growers are thinking at the most about 12 to 18 months in advance of what their crops they want to be growing and what the future of those crops might be. There was another very interesting characteristic that tied back to our first point of delegation versus personal engagement in are increasing revenue versus reducing cost. Once a grower identified the critical pieces, the critical points that had an impact on increasing revenue, they wanted to understand precisely what was happening inside the plant from a physiological perspective. Are we talking about kernels at a specific stage of kernel development? What influences that stage of kernel development? How can I change it? How can I increase test weight protein content? They would pay very close attention to those pieces. And then the extension from that is they would focus on developing manageable data. When I say manageable data, what I mean is they would identify a specific point. So let's just say for the sake of discussion that increasing protein content in wheat. After reading the literature and speaking to a group of advisors and consultants, a farmer might identify that increasing protein content on wheat is related to the mineral balance of six key minerals at a specific stage of plant development. I'm making up a hypothetical example that grower would then make absolutely certain, rather than just saying, okay, I need to make sure that plants have enough of these six minerals. I'm going to go out there and foliar feed all my acres with these six nutrients. Just before this time period, they wouldn't take a blanket shotgun approach, but instead they would say, okay, how can I know exactly what the nutritional requirements are of this plant at this stage of development? So I think a challenge that we have in parts of agriculture is we develop a lot of data, but it doesn't necessarily transfer readily into making management decisions. We can have all the data in the world, but what do we do with it? How can we transfer it into actually making a difference on a farm? The most successful growers have no desire to have a lot of data just for the sake of having a lot of data. They want to have data about those specific points that they know they can and need to influence in order to increase revenue. So that is a major piece that they focus on very intensely. Another intriguing characteristic of these exceptionally successful growers was the amount of time they spent learning just in observations and watching them. I would suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of about 5 to 10% of their time was spent learning, going, attending conferences, going to field days, reading books, talking to people on the phone, all these various activities they were constantly they were very inquisitive about learning new information that would help them manage their crops better. Sometimes in agriculture, it's a legacy business, and in that, many growers and many farmers see it as much more than just the opportunity to make money. It's also their home, it's their family, and they have a strong desire to leave a legacy behind. And that is an incredibly valuable mindset and mind frame from many different perspectives. However, it sometimes can lead to not wanting things to change from the way they have been. Somebody sent me a quote recently that kind of cracked me up a little bit. There are some people who are open to progress but resistant to change. So they're open to having progress happen, but they don't personally want the change. They want it to happen to other people. This characteristic absolutely does not define the most successful growers. These are growers that are extremely adaptable. In many cases, they are early adopters. They're constantly looking for new ideas and new technologies that can adopt and implement on their operation. There is one mantra that we heard repeated over and over again from these early adopters. They may have a bit more of an appetite to try new things. They're more comfortable with the risk of trying new things. Conducting a pilot, running some trials, testing things on their own operation. This was a mantra that was quite common. Think big, start small, and scale fast. When experimenting with new technologies and new ideas, they might conduct a trial on a small part of their total operation, but the moment it demonstrated performance and effectiveness, they would scale that very, very quickly across their entire operation, where they might increase, they might go from 3% of their acres one year to once they were satisfied that whatever new technology they were testing was working very well for them, 80 or 90% the second or third year. So it would scale very, very quickly. All those pieces that I discussed now are, up to this point, are relatively logical, straightforward, and you might be thinking, oh, they're. They're not such a big deal. But intriguingly enough, there are a couple of those characteristics that I talked about that many farmers consistently fail to apply. But this next group, two more characteristics, are not commonly talked about. They are not necessarily logical. They catch many people by surprise initially. Then when they start to think about them, I often get the response, oh, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. The first characteristic in this group is that the most successful growers, the most successful farmers, develop a deep, intuitive connection to the crops that they're growing. This is a characteristic that, particularly in agriculture and farming, we're very comfortable Talking about this in the context of animal agriculture, but many people have been sometimes less comfortable talking about it in the context of working with plants. So you're working with a dairy farmer in my community when I was growing up. And even today there'll be a lot of small scale dairies that would have their upper end cows that the cows that they were taking really good care of would still be in tie stalls. In these smaller scaled areas, it would be completely normal for a farmer to walk into a tie stall barn with two rows of cows. All the cows are standing there patiently waiting to be fed. They all look essentially identical. And he would point that one cow and say, there's something wrong with that cow. And there is absolutely no visual indication that we can quantify that something is wrong with that cow, but the farmer will work with her and treat her and hopefully get her to recover before she becomes worse. In the dairy farming world, this is very common. It's considered to be a characteristic of good dairy employees and good dairy managers. They pay very close attention to the animals that are in their care. I'm using cows as an example, but the same holds true for sheep or chickens or hogs or anything else. Perhaps not chickens and hogs and large scale operations. And of course, everything that I'm describing for animals is true if you have an operation small enough to facilitate a bit of connection. But we find that the most successful growers have this same type of connection to the crops that they're working with. For example, we might be walking with a grower through an orchard and we get to one block and the grower will say something like, I have no idea what's going on with this block, but it just doesn't feel right. This block doesn't feel good. Something is wrong, something is off. And he can't really quantify why he feels that way. There is not a specific indicator that he can point to to say, ah, this is a problem. He may look for indicators to try to justify why he is feeling a certain way. Anyway, without belaboring the point any further, I would just want to say that it's become very clear that the most successful growers actively try to have that connection to their crops and to try to pay very close attention to what's happening and what's going on in the field to the point where they can feel when something is off, even when they may not be able to articulate it with words. That intuitive connection then leads to the second major characteristic which really defines these exceptional managers. They acknowledge and begin Resolving the internal dissonance between their ideals and their core values and some of the decisions that they feel forced to make on a day to day basis. What do I mean by that? Well, when I speak with growers and I ask them the question, why do you farm? What is it that attracted you to farming? You could have chosen many other professions, I could have chosen to leave at any point. But you've chosen to remain in a profession that is really challenging. It's a lot of hard work, there's long hours, pay is uncertain. Why did you chose to continue farming? And when I begin unwrapping the answers and digging a little bit deeper, the common theme that emerges is many growers have a strong desire to be connected to life and living processes. They love watching seeds germinate in the spring, watching the joy of a newborn animal bouncing around, listening to the songbirds as they migrate back in the spring, watching flowers bloom. These connections to living processes and living systems are really at the foundation of, of why many farmers chose to remain in farming. The challenge is that since the Green revolution, particularly in the last 50 years, we have adopted a model of agriculture that is directly antagonistic to these core values. Where we have a model of agriculture that is very much based on a warfare mentality of search and destroy. Identify a specific pest, identify a specific pathogen and figure out how you can kill it. If you're not successful with the first weapon of choice, you simply get a bigger bomb, get a stronger pesticide, get a stronger fungicide. On one hand, we have this deep core value and this desire to produce healthy, high quality food and to do a really good job, to leave a legacy for our children and our grandchildren for the future. We have these ideals and these core values to produce a much higher quality product that doesn't have any negative impacts on people, doesn't have any negative impacts on the land. But on the other hand, we are often in a position where we feel the need to apply pesticides and to apply products that we know are damaging to our soil health, we know have the potential to be damaging to the people who are consuming that food. And this is what I refer to as the internal dissonance, the dissonance between our ideals and the choices that we feel forced to make. What I've observed with the most exceptional farm managers who are doing a really great job is they recognize the internal dissonance. They don't necessarily make an immediate switch or change, and I would be the last to recommend that they don't. All of a sudden, one day Wake up and say, okay, I'm never going to apply any pesticides ever again. Instead they say, oh, that's why I've been feeling the way that I've been feeling this subtle sense of discomfort. So I'm making it my goal, my personal goal, to get to a point where I can really live the core values and the ideals that I have where I no longer need to apply pesticides because I really want to leave a legacy for the future. So I want to actively begin working towards that and I want to begin learning about how I can really achieve the goals that I have around my personal ideals and my personal core values every single time. When a grower recognizes that and begins thinking about it, how can I begin farming growing crops in a way that aligns with my core values and begins working towards that, they become incredibly fulfilled. They begin having a lot of fun. And there is a lot of passion and spark in those growers that is contagious. And they're really fun people to be around because they're learning new things. They are excited and there is an incredible level of enthusiasm. They are having a ton of fun. They love what they do. I have spoken to many different groups of farmers and growers over the years. There are some groups, sometimes you go to a conference or a trade show and the energy is down. It's just flat. People are talking about disease challenges and insect challenges and weather challenges, always weathered challenges, and there's a sense of pessimism. And then sometimes you could go to other conferences where there is an overwhelming sense of optimism and enthusiasm. And people love what they do and they're really fulfilled in the work that they're doing. Generally, those conferences are the events where farmers have begun moving towards farming after their own ideals and after their own values. Many of the growers that we work with as a company are not organic. There are also many that are, but most are not. But I will say that the the energy and the spirit at an organic farming conference or a regenerative agriculture or a no till farming conference, as compared to a conventional mainstream agriculture conference, is completely different. And I would invite anyone. If you haven't participated in one of those none mainstream events, I would suggest that you participate sometime just to get a sense for what I'm describing and talking about. It's a very worthwhile use of your time. One of the pieces that I could perhaps expand on just because it's so important, is the very first piece that I talked about how prioritizing the finances of a farm changes a grower's behavior around where they spend their personal time and energy. Let me give you an example that I'm intimately familiar with, which is cherry production. Cherry growers are directly compensated for size and firmness, so producing large, firm cherries is a direct result of understanding the overall tree physiology, but then in particular understanding what is happening at the cell division and cell expansion phase. So the most successful growers focus on understanding that piece of fruit tree physiology really, really well. They will ask questions about what is happening at cell division and cell expansion and and try to understand that piece and not delegate it to someone else. All right. I hope you've enjoyed the discussion tonight. Thanks everyone. Bye.

This podcast was brought to you by a great company that I work for, AEA Advancing Eco Agriculture, the leader in regenerative agriculture since 2006. At AEA, we believe in challenging the status quo to find more profitable and regenerative ways to grow crops. We also believe that healthy plants are resistant to pest and disease, and that to grow healthy crops, we must first think different. About agriculture, about empowering life instead of suppressing life. About regeneration versus degeneration. To achieve this, we formulate and sell products that help growers produce higher quality yield with less risk of crop failure. In short, we help growers make more money with less risk. Thanks for listening.