A fine winter evening, cold with rain turning to snow, a fire in the fireplace, and I was reading my way through a stack of magazines. Food and Wine and Cooks Illustrated were pleasant and generated another stack of recipes to try. Then I opened Farm Futures.
Farm Futures bills itself as “Business and Management Tools for Profitable Farming.” Business and management and profit, that all sounds good. I want to be well-organized and make money, seems like this would be the magazine for me. But it was one discouraging read.
Some quotes from this issue.
“Make sure all employees and managers have a sense of urgency…”
Why assume that a farm needs both employees and managers? Why should a farm be that big? Or even if you do have employees, that they need management? There’s an implication in this quote that unless your farm is so big that you have layers of management, you simply don’t exist as far as Farm Futures magazine is concerned.
Then the urgency. Urgency is a bad thing, unless perhaps you have blood spurting from an open wound. Urgency on a day-to-day basis is a sickness. If you have a sense of urgency, except in a crisis situation, you need to step back, take a deep breath, and think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Instilling a sense of urgency in day-to-day work is a sure sign of an organization that is frightened and has no clear sense of what is important.
“Spend more time in the office managing, instead of on production chores.”
The idea that for a farmer managing is more important than producing is fundamentally wrong. A farmer that isn’t spending most of their1 time in the fields or among the livestock has lost their way. There is a disturbing implication that management is of higher value than producing. This is an idea I disagree with. In any endeavor those who produce are of higher value than those who manage.
“A frightful thing is a misinformed soccer mom with a cell phone and a Twitter account talking about you.”
This is just an insulting and stupid thing to say. What if that soccer mom you’re trying to persuade read that quote?
In bold red letters, “ADAPT NEW TECH OR DIE, INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA”
In case you’re thinking by this point that I’m an old crank railing against anything new and especially that there newfangled Internet, let me tell you that I wrote the HTML and CSS to present that last quote in bold red by hand and by memory.
“Adapt or die; resist and perish,” said Earl Butz speaking of farmers who rejected his get big or get out philosophy. It makes me wonder if this headline was a tip of the hat to Earl. I doubt it, I don’t credit the authors of this stuff with that much insight. Acknowledged or not, Earl Butz, with his policies of “get big or get out” and “fencerow to fencerow” farming, is their patron saint.
While this sort of statement is commonplace, it is simply fear based persuasion. It’s a way to sell something that is not needed. Stop and think for a moment. Is your farm going to die if you don’t adapt social media? I spend too much time on Facebook, and if anything I’d say the opposite is true. Time I spend on social media is time I’m not spending doing something that will directly benefit my farm.
“what happens to your debt-to-assets ratio if land prices fall 10%”
It’s obvious what happens. More important is, “what changes if land prices fall 10%?” Why, nothing at all, unless you intend to sell your land. They’re implying here that you’re so deeply in debt that this would make a difference. The only value in this quote is that if you’re in so much debt that it would matter, it should raise a huge red flag that you’re in trouble.
“… it makes little sense to have a reduced debt goal and pay more taxes.”
So it is better to have debt and pay less taxes? I’m not an accountant or any sort of financial expert. But let’s consider two scenarios and see what common sense tells us.
Let’s say in scenario 1 I have 100 dollars in debt and 100 dollars in gross income. That debt costs me 5 dollars a year I can take it off my taxes (and my income, so my net income is $95). I pay, say, 30% tax on my income, so I pay tax on 95 dollars after I take my debt interest off, or 28 dollars and 50 cents. I put 66 dollars and 50 cents in my pocket at the end of the year.
In scenario 2 I have paid off my debt. I have 100 dollars in income and no interest on debt to deduct. I pay taxes on the entire 100 dollars, or 30 dollars. I put 70 dollars in my pocket at the end of this year.
Which is better to have in my pocket? $70 or $66.50? Clearly to me it’s better to have less debt, pay more taxes, and end up with more in my pocket at the end of the year. Which is why I’ll never make it as a big time financial wizard.
and finally my favorite, or I should say my least favorite.
“A farm may have a nice profit; however, if this profit is not equal to or above the average for their area, they are actually falling behind.”
It’s not good enough to have a “nice profit.” If you’re not besting your neighbors you’re falling behind and will soon be devoured by the alpha farmers.
I have trouble with the reasoning behind this statement. I guess to the writers of Farm Futures being left behind with your nice profit is a bad thing. It’s much better to get ahead by instilling panic and fear in your employees, by increasing debt, by living in fear of soccer moms, in fear of social media and technology, and by measuring yourself against your neighbors.
I’ve never been a Boston fan, they by and large always sounded like noise to me, but this snippet of lyrics from their song “Piece of Mind” says what I’m trying to in just 4 lines.
I understand about indecision
But I don’t care if I get behind
People living in competition
All I want is to have my peace of mind
1My grammar skills are shaky, but not so shaky as to mix singular and plural through ignorance or lack of care. I read Douglas Hofstadter’s essay on gender neutral pronouns back in 1989 and it has stuck with me to this day and inspires me to be aware of gender stereotypes in my writing. In this case I probably should’ve re-written the sentence to make the gender a non-issue. Not wanting to think that hard, I resorted to the expedient, if clumsy, use of the plural ‘their’ to avoid stereotyping the gender of ‘farmer.’
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