Farming as a business

I have a friend that has been studying at university and college for nearly 6 years now so that he can be the best grain farmer possible one day. He thinks (rightly so) that farming is a business and requires a specialized skill set to do properly and the fact that so many people "fall back on farming" is a reason there are so many bad farmers out there.

Things aren't any different here. People don't farm because they always wanted to be farmers and it's their passion and what they're good at. They farm because it's the only source of money and the cheapest way to get food. On top of that, the whole mentality around farming is different. There is an emphasis to teach people to "Farm as a business" which means don't give things away to your friends and calculate expenses and income. The fact that this is being taught (and with good reception) probably indicates that lots of people don't take it as a business now, although most of the farmers I know enthusiastically treat it as such, but I've got a biased group of friends.

Bottom line, most people are really crappy farmers, for a lot of reasons, a big one being that they have neither the motivation nor specific talents and skills to be good farmers. To run a farm as a business means that you need to be a businessperson and in my experience, that's not common among anyone. The thing is that in Canada we don't all have to be businesspeople or farmers, we can be truck drivers, welders, nurses and teachers, all of which can have nothing to do with business skills.

So what about laziness?

Sometimes people prioritize things above farming, not surprising. Sometimes I look at a field and think "if those guys just got in there now, they'd earn 25% more money this year on this crop…" So why don't people "get in there" when they should? One thing I can think of is procrastination. It is easier and nicer to sit around visiting with friends for an extra hour in the morning than it is to do an extra hour of intense physical labour and the reality is that you won't even feel the repercussions until harvest next year, which is a long time off.


Being employed by someone else shortens the time between your actions and the repercussions. Also it's easier to tell someone to do something than it is to do it yourself. For those reasons and the fact that business skills are not common, I wish that bad farmers would give up their land to good farmers and become their employees. BOLD!...?