We often say that agriculture is unpredictable, however, if we've learned anything over the last year, nothing can truly be counted on. Things can change in a minute, in one heartbeat including plans. A huge part of running a business is planning. I'm sure you've seen the TikTok sound clip that goes something like this “make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan” (Leonard Snart, The Flash). Throwing plans away is part of our culture. But what if we added back the real part of planning... make the plan, execute the plan, review the results and adjust the plan?
Reviewing Plans
When I was studying to get my CPA, the deciding factor for actually learning was not getting my work done, it was reviewing and debriefing on the feedback. Debriefing is a critical part of learning. It is also the step that gets overlooked the most. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So if we never actually review and change plans, it becomes a challenge to fix anything.
Reviewing the results of your plans will give you a real insight into what is happening on your farm. The most unfortunate statistic I learned this week is that only 63% of farms review their financial statements. That is crazy, but I believe it. That is the absolute most basic kind of reviewing a business owner can do. If you do not understand your financial statements, ask your accountant to explain them, we’re here for that (plus I’m sad when clients don’t read their report card).
Hit Record
Reviewing your plans instead of throwing them out the window starts with keeping notes. Your memory is not that amazing, nobody remembers every tiny detail. With spring fieldwork underway, take the time to write down what you are doing and what is happening around the farm. If writing is a challenge and you’re sitting in the tractor anyway, open up the recorder app on your phone and make a voice memo of what is going on. Plans do not have to be formal. Just having some kind of record will help jog your memory when it comes time to review.
If you’re cropping, you’ll probably have to wait until harvest to have the results of your plans. And that’s where the fading memory comes in. It is really difficult to compare results with incomplete information. For example, I know we put the rams in a few weeks ago but by the time lambing approaches, I’m really glad for that little green notebook to tell me the exact dates. In a year where double-cropping could be a reality, every day counts. Write down what you did (or record it) so the feedback loop can run on complete information.
Sit Down and Look at the Results
In livestock, the feedback loop can happen a lot faster. Lambing is wrapping up for the most part so it’s a great time to look at your results and compare them to your plans. This is the key. If there is one thing that is almost guaranteed to help your farm in the long run, it’s sitting down and looking at the results. What should you look at and have available for your review?
Financial statements for the time period
Fieldnotes of what you did when
Production yields
Comments/feedback from buyers
Weather pattern information
All the Edits
Once you have all your information and have read over everything, it’s time to make edits. Ask yourself how things can be improved. What did you learn? What do you never want to do again and most importantly why? Was there a point where a certain action could have made a difference? Do not beat yourself up in this process, everyone has successes and failures, the key is to try to not repeat them or throw out the plan altogether.
As usual, I’m using sheep for the example. In reviewing my sheep plans, I am usually looking at the following:
The number of ewes I exposed to breed versus the number of ewes that actually lambed.
The number of lambs per ewe, the number that died and the number that got marketed (or will be).
I dragged up the numbers from spring 2020 and compared them to those on a percentage level and in total. This spring, we had fewer lambs per ewe but we’ve marketed more lambs overall.
Then I’m going to pull out my notebook and find out why we had fewer lambs by looking at what we did during the breeding period and the overall gestation. While I would need to do a scientific study to make serious conclusions on what happened, I can see that we used a higher ewe to ram ratio, and we were exposing the ewes at the very beginning of the breeding season.
And then I make my notes, add or subtract things from the plan and try again. It’s a whole lot easier to edit a plan than it is to start over again completely. And as for that quote at the beginning… you can expect the plan to go off the rails and you can plan for it (usually, unless it’s a year like 2020).
That’s all for tonight, thank you for reading!