Don’t Let Traditional Thinking Hold Your Farm Back From New Growth
September 27, 2023 I drove a hand-me-down car from my parents when I was in high school. It was big and boxy, allowing a dozen skinny kids to pile in, so I was the popular choice of driver at lunch throughout my senior year. That’s despite the sleek cars my better-off classmates drove, from Porsches to 300ZXs (the newly released It car in the 1980s). One classmate had a DeLorean.
But odd things began happening to my ’70s-era tank. Windows spontaneously moved up and down. I’d turn on the windshield wipers and the horn would honk.
My takeaway was to avoid being a first-generation owner of anything. Electronics were a modern luxury in the ’70s when my land barge rolled off the sales lot. Less than 10 years later, Big Bertha was full of weird quirks.
Matt McGuire, Chief Agricultural Officer at JV Smith Companies, challenged my view.
He talked about working with an engineer who was helping him find a way to have as much of the operation’s paperwork flow through an integrated system. He needed his accounting software to work with the workers’ time clocks, and the data recorded in the field related to food safety work with everyone down the chain who needed the information.
Nothing yet existed, and the only way to get a working system was to support the engineer through the inevitable hiccups that come from creating something new.
A brilliant, long-view approach. No wonder McGuire and JV Smith Companies earned the national title for the 2023 American Vegetable GrowerSM Grower Achievement Award.
And it makes me wonder what other “wise” insights need to be challenged.
During a trip to Salinas in August, I had drinks with a group of ag women. One mentioned a new study that would confound retailer’s ideas on food safety in managing perimeter field ditches. Apparently, ditches with no vegetation had more mice than those with vegetation. And trackers showed they intruded into fields less often when they had a food supply in the ditch.
Watch for that particular article in the next couple of months!
With so many multi-generational farms and businesses, ag is filled with a lot of knowledge and tradition. But sometimes tradition can hold us back if it’s not examined from time to time. Take a look at what you know to be true on your farm and ask yourself if there is just possibly a better way.
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