Bring on the New Year, But Lets Take it Slow

Am I the only person to find the ending of one year and the beginning of a new one a bit overwhelming? Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of “a new beginning” or “a new mindset” that comes with the turning of the calendar. I just find myself swimming in a sea of where do I begin? I blame most of it on my trained career in producing farm financials. January 1st means it is time for income taxes, balance sheets, cash flows and a new set of books. Yuck! You don’t find too many farmers or ranchers that picked this profession because of their love of book keeping. However, through this same training, I developed a great deal of respect for goal setting and business planning. I have been a part of numerous goal setting sessions, I have seen farms do wrong and right by their goals, and I know a little about what works well and what doesn’t. I have also implemented these goal setting practices on our farm so I am not just telling you what may work, I know what worked well for us and what didn’t. So here is a checklist for goal setting that I hope speaks to some of you if not all.

Make your goals realistic and achievable. Don’t pick items that can’t happen or you can’t control. For example I find on our cow/calf operation often calf death loss % hits our goal list. We of course want a low death loss, but we also live in a cold harsh climate which means we can’t always control the weather or think we won’t loose a calf or 2 due to unfavorable weather events.

Communicate goals with all the people the goal affects. If your goal is to improve calf death loss, make sure whoever is in charge of birthing and calf care knows what the goal is and understands the purpose. If you have a goal but don’t relay the goal to the people who are in charge of that department it will not have a high success rate of being reached.

Write goals down. Seems simple, but this is the most critical step of reaching the goal. Nobody is accountable is you don’t write them down. Also even more important, it is too easy to bail out on a goal if you don’t put pen to paper. Writing goals down allow other people to be a part of goal success.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the goals you want to set in place. Keep goals simple and attainable but at the same time beneficial to the farm operation. Make a set of farm goals, personal goals, and family goals for each generation involved. Try to limit goals to less than 5 to start with or you will fall into an overwhelming state. Also try to consider the uncontrollables such as weather when generating goals to keep success rate realistic.

Goal setting is such a critical component of setting the profitable successful farms and ranches apart from the rest of the herd. Keeping a clear vision to work towards everyday while holding employees, family members or business partners accountable for your farms success is such an essential piece of farm management today. Mental health is so much stronger and positive moral for the farm operation can be half the battle in today’s agricultural industry. Communication is created and the journey can be enjoyable if the shared end result is farm profitability and success.