Find Your Passion

Finding your passion for agriculture comes quite easy for those who have been brought up in rule and remote areas. Most of us from the time that we are born have a passion or a focus that we want to direct ourselves. This can be working with the agriculture livestock industry, Broadacre cropping, horticulture, and many other industry sectors within agriculture. As these are sectors of the industry that many find where their passion lies, the passion behind these industries is what drives efficiencies productivity and the burn to be constantly improving is competing against your last record.

You’ve heard the saying “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. This rings very true for those working in Australian agriculture, as Warren Buffett outlines this is the very beginning in the unlimited factor of how you want to be successful and what you should be successful in. If you’re working within agriculture and you haven’t found what your passion is to make sure you take up different roles across the industry as agriculture is the most diverse industry we believe that you can do any role thinkable than what they do in retail, fashion, and even hospitality.

We found our passion working with our family farm and our sheep stud was working with the Farms Advice Podcast we are able to communicate and connect with the wider community within agriculture and still keep our finger on the pulse.

Hire Well

This is one of the most important elements to get right in your farming enterprise as having the right people in your organization can help you reach your next goals. By using their initiative and being a proactive person within the workplace on-farm in office it doesn’t matter where they are so long that they’re good communicators, they’re honest about what’s happening on the farm and they’re able to fill in the gaps to see where you can improve day-to-day routines but also for the long-term outlook for your farm.

if you go to a few farm in conferences and they talk about to make sure that you do the hundred $300 an hour of jobs and you have someone in there doing the $25-30 jobs to be able to give you the time back that you need to focus on working on the farm, not in the farm. If you are able to hire well on-farm or within your have your business it will allow you that time to work on growing the business, and just by taking a step back, you’ll be able to see where the business is going or where you need to pivot to next. Hiring well applies to both seasonal and long-term full-time workers, do you want to have your workers all thinking the same and all communicating within the same channel.

For new employees on your farm, start an onboarding process so for anyone you coming on knows what the expectations are, to begin with. This can really help you out in the Longrun and ensures that both of you are on the same terms from the get-go.

Listen to Ryan Hoibergs Episode Recruiting in Agribusiness

Don’t Care What Others Think

In agriculture you will very well know that we have a lot of people tell me is how to do a job and what we should be doing on-farm in at 80 businesses each day. Is the beginning of the production systems for whatever food group you are growing would you come under the scrutiny of those that consume the food. As farmers over the generations within Australia, we have learned to develop a thick skin in order to push through what needs to be done and what can be done in the current circumstances.

The Farms Advice Podcast was built around the agribusiness community. By focusing on the internals of the industry and how we can help those currently working to become a better enterprise through lifting efficiency and productivity we will be able to optimize our farms by not overextending our reach. If you are focusing on your own farm and how you can improve your figures for both your production management and your sustainability goals this will impact the way others see how we conduct business on the farm.

another aspect of this is you don’t need to care what someone thinks but if it is a well valid point, you should take it into consideration when looking at it it may go to improve the way you operate. Just take a look around and see what others are doing within the industry especially the successful operations, they’re not focusing on what others think and what they have been telling them from the outside, they’re building internally and creating success from what they know and from the passion of theirs in the industry.

Read, Read, Read

Reading is the quickest way to find out how someone else works by using different techniques or technology. The first material that I read from front to back was actually the land newspaper and that’s what’s got it started for me. A few years ago I set my new years resolution to read one book a month and have since done this each year. Don’t set your limit just sent you a benchmark so one book a month was my benchmark it just allows me to get onto it reading 10,20 or even 30 pages each day will get you to around 30 books a year It enables you to be able to see how it can be done another way or by looking into the leaders of the industry by biographies or memoirs.

We’ve gone through an outline of the best agribusiness books and self-development that you can find, we’ve also had a few offers on a podcast so make sure you check out those episodes and hopefully a few more Australian farm-related books on the way.

Have A Margin Of Safety

As a farmer or anyone working agribusiness, we are one of the best at managing risk. The risk is associated with the environment or financially. Most of the time those to play hand-in-hand when you take an environmental risk not knowing where the next rains coming by purchasing a mob of cows on mower sheep or putting in that crop are you unsure of the next rain developments. We are having a margin of safety as an agribusiness farmer you should be looking at your margin of safety is looking at it like you want to take on 40% of your income that will come from this risky bet. Or even 10%, you can’t be risking your revenue that will undo everything going at 100% risk versus reward.

Ensure that you have a margin of safety for your enterprise. Make sure that it is standardised so that you will be able to keep it within 10% or whatever your makeup is. The margin of safety will allow you to operate in the next financial year and ensure that the level of risk if it was to go pear-shaped you still have your business.

Have A Competitive Advantage

Having a competitive advantage is advantageous within business-to-consumer or business-to-business roles and also has a level for those working within every business. For those working within agriculture by having a competitive advantage means that you have new techniques working with new technology that others are yet to adopt, by being an early mover within the industry you’ll be able to get ahead of the game and just to get your farm running as best as you can.

Most of the time in agriculture by working as a team or collaboratively with another farm business or tech company means that you have an advantage by working together and solving the problem a lot quicker than you would on your own. With that being said having a competitive advantage whether you’re a sheep stud cattle stud cropping it will push you to look for a better way to manage run your farm/agribusiness.

Schedule For Your Personality

Depending on your personality type will depend on how you organise your day today with yourself but also your employee’s colleagues and family. With agriculture been very Industry your schedule from day-to-day can be a bit all over the place. If you’re someone that can manage to have to do 10 things at once then it works really well just to run it off the cuff, but on the other hand, if you want to be organised approach it method authority it’s best to write a list and so you can take off these tasks. Start planning out your week and see how you can improve the way you run.

Always Be Competing

this point from Warren Buffett is really important in progressing your agribusiness further. Whichever way you look at it being competitive with yourself will always drive you to improve the outcomes. The two things that you should be competing with are your last year’s results and the industry benchmark. As a podcast, each month we are competing with our last month’s results meaning we’re trying to grow our listenership on top of last month. Set yourself a goal of drawing by 10% each month or even 1% in every culture the margin is not to be that big to get good results.

Model Success

What does success look like to your business? Once you have your goals aligned and you know where you want your business to go and at which level you will find the success you will be able to hit the target easier than if you didn’t have them at all. By modelling what success looks like for your own farm agribusiness or your career you can really start to target these different elements in it in order to reach your goals. You may base your success on production levels, your lifestyle and all your financial success.

Before you finish reading Warren Buffett top 10 rules of success make sure you take the element and model how you would want to be successful within your own enterprise farm or agribusiness.

Give Unconditional Love

the last rule of success but probably the most prominent and important rule Warren Buffett has outlined. When it comes to why we are working within agriculture, why we want to build a successful business, and where is yourselves in 10 or 20 years. We want to live a life that’s full of passion and surrounded by those who have similar goals to us so that we can bounce ideas off and have some downtime when we need to. As farmers, the average age is 58 so that’s roughly 40 seasons of farming before we reach the age of 60 years old. We do it to make a great life for our families and to have the flexibility of doing what we love, spending time with family and checking the paddocks.

Love what YOU do!