Sometimes my neighbor, a 31 year old Oberlin graduate who has been farming for about ten years, comes over to sit in my living room and try out his ideas on me. I knit and we talk, sometimes for much longer than either of us ever intended. In the winter we can do this, of course. In the summer our conversations are only about how much squash I need for the CSA and when he is going to get to the barn with the crates of bok choy.
He started out as a worker on the Plancks' farm and he turned into a self-employed farmer. Like so many of us, he has no academic training as a farmer -- I think he majored in Renaissance recorder playing or something. But he has a lot of relevant aptitudes and he thinks about lots of details and he loves to construct equipment out of metal.
The other day he came over to talk about his business plan for his next big leap. He is ready to buy some land and establish a real farm of his own. Up until now he has been renting small pieces of ground, starting over in a new location at least three times in the last ten years. Unlike most farmers, I don't think he has ever had a season where he lost money. He is conservative in his approach, he makes sure he has a market for what he is growing, and he doesn't try to do too much at once. He does most of the work himself.
All of this is completely different from the origins of the farm that grew me. Not all farms start out the same, but he has the huge advantage of coming after a series of successful farms -- people who have shared their experience and their land and their resources. Now young farmers can copy older farmers and take what lessons they want to. They don't have to make every single mistake themselves.
So we were sitting there going over some of his ideas and questions and at some point he said to me, "but you aren't a real business person." I didn't argue with him. I don't actually agree with him, but what he meant is that I don't make decisions based on the numbers on the spreadsheet. I have a whole complex set of values that get all mixed up with the numbers. So I am not purely a business person, that is true. But somehow we have managed together to keep this business afloat for the 33 years since my father died (he was the business person in the family, but he also had a lot of other priorities to juggle) so it is inaccurate to say that I am not a business person.
Because none of us on this farm has the vocabulary of a real business person, we are free to make up our own business principles. Obviously we learned the first one at my father's knee: "income must exceed outgo." That's the one we know matters the most, if we want to keep farming. But my own founding principle is:
" your choices are much better when greed is not your main motivator." And the most important resource of any sustainable business is the relationships that it builds and keeps. Relationships of all kinds. So another rule to live by is: " no burning bridges, you might need that bridge again."
This could get really long and boring. But I just wanted to say out loud here that we are absolutely business people here at this farm. We just allow for all sorts of other interesting values to get entwined in our decisions. We like odd people. We like helping new farmers. We like change. We like being part of a group. We like working in the summer and playing in the winter. We don't want to grow things that we don't like to eat, unless absolutely everyone else likes to eat them and then we bend that rule.
Business is not so different from politics, probably. It's about selling your ideas of what your product is. My sister Lani is a crazy business person, much more out on a limb than we are in so many ways. Greedy people give business a bad name. But it's not business that's the problem there, it's people who take the short view and think that money is the most important outcome. Money is vital, but it's not the only outcome that matters.
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