Over the weekend I sat down for awhile and thought about what my goals are, personal, professionally, and for the farm. I spent some time really thinking about where I see myself in five years, ten years, and at the end of my career. What do I want to see accomplished? What are the things I will be proud of on the farm? What will be the lasting impact I have on my family and their legacy?
If you ever have been to one of those business conferences, the speakers always talk about how important mission statements, and vision statements are. Many workshops have you brainstorm different ideas on how to get to where you want to go, and then critique your feeble attempts at the job. I agree that having a direction, and putting your expectations in writing makes a difference in the way you pursue your dreams. However, at this point, I haven't come up with an all encompassing statement to define my life. I do have a set of things I would like to accomplish, and I have written some concise goals to help me accomplish each of those things. My ultimate vision for the farm is to make it more sustainable and successful than it is now. I want to leave my mark as making an improvement.
My first goal, is to become a better pig farmer. I know all of the goal writing people out there are cringing, as this is neither specific,time-bound, nor something I can measure against in the future. It can be hard to decide when I have achieved this goal. I see this as more of a life- long learning project. To start on my path to achieve this, I want to successfully manage one of our finishing barns for a full turn. I need to do this to better understand disease issues, feed ordering, euthanasia, and communication with our load out teams. I will better understand our contract finishers. It will take me from being someone who is educated about the process of finishing hogs, and give me some hands-on experience.
A much more concrete goal for the farm is to have one alternative marketing strategy in place by 2015. Now many conventional farmers aren't into things like this, and it probably won't be the way to make most of the revenue for the farm. However, it is a way to reach into the community, and connect with the people who are more interested in food production than the average consumer. This may be through local branding and marketing, custom hogs, specialty bacon, or even grass-fed cattle. By doing this, I increase my farm's brand value, while learning about different production methods to help prepare me for the future of agriculture. My farm may look completely different in twenty years, and I need to be prepared for that. In order to create action on this goal, I need to reach out to people who work in alternative agriculture marketing, because I am not the expert.
These aren't the only goals that I have, but they are two things that I can work on right now that will have a positive impact on my future. As I begin to understand agriculture better, I can move forward and form more goals while honing in on my direction. There is something scary and exciting about really diving into the business, but I am really at a turning point as to how I view my position in agriculture.
As farmers, we are very good at executing day-to-day tasks, multitasking, and attention to detail. We like to make our farm as good as we can with the tools we have. We need to take time out of our days and compare our activities today and our goals for tomorrow, to see if our actions are leading us towards them. Some of us may need to sit down and honestly realize that we aren't sure what our goals are, besides keeping the business afloat- a daunting task in itself at times- although self-preservation isn't usually the measure of highly successful companies. We need to think forward and lead.
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