Incentives

Having ownership of the outcome of your work is one thing (skin in the game), but incentive structures are another. How are you rewarded for your work? In recent discussions with a farmer, he made the comment “I don’t get paid to feed sheep”. It’s true. Businesses...

Who’s wearing the risk?

A lot of farmers are discussing the quality of their service from suppliers and service providers recently. From what I’ve observed, it’s larger businesses with employees lacking care for the service they provide. Which got me questioning, are our agricultural service...

The problem

When I go to an agriculture conference or field day, there’s normally a speaker talking about the importance of, and need for, farmers to feed the world. There is plenty of discussion around increasing production, how we can get marginal gains through a new practise...

The threshold of scaling

We can’t talk agricultural development without talking scale. The invention of the hoe meant a farmer could hoe more land and successfully produce more food for his work. The plough did the same. And so did the tractor. Economies of scale is a pretty simple concept to...

Where does a forecast come from?

It’s always good to consider where market analysis comes from. Forecasts have about the same probability of being right as a monkey winning a darts competition. But that’s not the point. The point of marketing decisions for farmers is in managing the risks they take....

Patient Capital

When we plant seeds or invest in a crop or sheep, we have an expectation that the harvest won’t be for some time, maybe even several years. Most capital and commodity markets, however, have an expectation of some sort of return straight away. Markets, by and large,...