Goals are measureable milestones that you intend to accomplish as you pursue your vision for your farm. By committing your goals to writing, and discussing them with all interested parties, you get the buy-in necessary to accomplish them.
Some planners prefer to describe and assess their resources before they set their goals. However set your goals, then complete a stock take of your resources before you finalise your goals for your farm. Another advantage to considering your goals before you do any measuring of your resources, is that the process will help you to prioritise the physical factors that you should measure, before you rush off and start the measuring. For instance, there is little point in gathering data on microclimates at an intense scale if the farm landscape is only ever going to be used for pastoral farming. Microclimate measurements may still be useful at a broader mapping intensity on different landscape features to help decide on the best mixes of grasses and clovers in pasture mixes but is not as important in that context as good quality soil mapping to differentiate soils for subdivision planning and grazing management. If there is a limited budget for measurement then your availability of funds will help decide the priority order of undertaking surveys or measuring different aspects of your land resources.
Whenever I go into a new region or start a new Farm Plan, one of my first steps is to sit down with all of the involved parties and decide on a priority list of factors for information gathering. In Southland, the priorities were clearly soil mapping and temperature measurement because the region was at the lower limits of available heat for the growth of many crops. In Southwest Western Australia, the priorities were different - water quality and salinity were issues that assumed as much importance as soils and microclimates. I have come to realise that this prioritisation process is very important and that no two regions nor farms, have exactly the same priorities.
In the Farm Plan process, I have often found it useful to ask the farmer to break his goals down into short term, medium term and long term Goals. I normally ask farmers the questions: “Where do you want to be in two, five, ten years time?” There’s usually a short awkward silence followed by a fairly animated discussion as they start to appreciate the value of this planning exercise.
Short Term Goals
I usually describe short term goals as those that can be achieved in the current season or upcoming season. An example of a short term goal is; “Form prune all the deciduous fruit trees before the sap starts to run and buds start to appear in Spring”.
Short term goals usually describe in some detail immediate tasks that need to be completed.
Medium Term Goals
Medium term goals are those describing activities that can be completed within a two year time frame. So, for instance, a medium term goal for you might be to employ and train extra labour to give yourself some cover and enable you to take some planned time off the farm on a regular basis.
Long Term Goals
Long term goals are those that have a timeframe of five to ten years. These should include some of your bigger dreams, and objectives that you’d like to aspire to over a longer time-frame. As the average age of farmers in both New Zealand and Australia is over 56, this time frame should sensibly address the question of retirement for many, and intergenerational handover or sale of the property.
Refer to the article Developing a Farm Plan in Dorrigo about Graham and Bettina Spencer and how their Farm Plan helped them to optimise the value of their farm for sale to fund their retirement dreams of travel and quality time with their grandchildren? This happened because they set clear goals based on the planning process.
An Exercise
This exercise will give you practice in writing down your goals. Are your Goals SMART?
- Specific,
- Measureable,
- Achievable,
- Realistic
- and with a Timeframe.
Apply the SMART test to each goal and modify if necessary.
How do your goals match your answers to the Goal Planning Exercise questions?
Do they need modifying to meet your aims?
QUESTION 1: Where do you want to be in two years time?
QUESTION 2: What about in five years time?
QUESTION 3: Where do you see yourself in ten years time?
Your responses to the Goal Planning Exercise should be saved to your Farm Plan. It is important to follow the same process for all of your goals; Short term, Medium term and Long term. Once your goals are in writing you can refer to them again and again.
You should refer back to your goals and objectives after you have completed the measurement phases of the Farm Planning process and to also provide a structure to your Action Plan.
Planning techniques to help you to set your Goals.
A SWOT Analysis is a relatively simple assessment technique that can be used in many areas of planning and life. What I find is that SWOT analysis helps me to rationalise my emotional responses to issues, into a standardised format. SWOT stands for
- Strengths,
- Weaknesses,
- Opportunities
- and Threats.
In assessing the features of your farm, such as soils or microclimates you can use the SWOT technique to see if the feature fits with your Vision for the Farm. Does it match your vision or are there significant mismatches? If so, why do the mismatches exist and what can be done about them?
- Do your soils have characteristics such as soil structure which are strengths that can be exploited by your farming business?
- Do your soils have weaknesses such as soil fertility that need attention?
- What opportunities does the presence of a well-structured, friable soil offer to your business?
- What threats (or constraints) do your soils have, such as proneness to wind erosion?
Time Management
Some of us are good at managing our time, while others are absolutely hopeless. One of the things that starting a Farm Plan will start to identify is how you manage your farming time. Work smarter not harder. Planning will identify time management conflicts and labour shortfalls so that you can find solutions to these issues. Can you identify when you are under-utilising your own time? Are you doing jobs that are probably more cost-effective for a contractor or casual labourer to do?
Everyone is easily lured into comfort zone activities, doing those jobs which are probably well below your skill and recompense level and not returning you rewards in proportion to your effort: such as cultivating a paddock yourself rather than using a local contractor. This however, is not smart if there are contractors available in your area, when you add up the costs of your time, and the costs of owning and operating machinery.
Most farmers are fiercely independent operators and hate to employ others to do work that they think they can do better and cheaper themselves. However, this can be shortsighted and is not particularly smart farming, particularly if you have alternative income earning capacity at a higher level, that will pay for your contractors.
One of the issues that your Plan will quickly identify is any knowledge gaps for either you, your partner(s) or your family. There are plenty of both on-line training and residential training programmes available to meet most of the information needs of farmers nowadays, at least in New Zealand and Australia.
If you have a particular information need that is not being met by either of these two delivery systems in a way that is suitable for you, please send me, Gary Hutchinson editor@informedfarmers.com, an email and I may be able to direct you to a suitable training course or advisor.
Estate Planning
One of the big issues in farming is the intergenerational transfer of land. The process is seldom without significant hurdles put in the way by the complexity of taxation considerations or family relationships. The presence of a Farm Plan can provide reassurance for all parties and maximise value of the farm asset for all involved. As it has been said “owners come and go but the land endures”.
