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Business management skills
Encouraging better take up of business management skills including use of risk management tools
A relative lack of formal business skills could create a logjam in implementing other measures to improve competitiveness and resilience. This would be especially true where farmers do not recognise gaps in their own skills or those of their staff. Stakeholders thought that, in general, farmers already have a high level of agronomic skills, but saw a need to build on these with increased business expertise to help address the threats and opportunities they faced.
In some ways, this is linked to the issues regarding self-assessment. As the document identifies and has been made previously, part of the issue is the lack of availability of financial risk management tools given relative stability in key agricultural markets until recently. However, there is a point to be made that when their businesses are becoming more specialised and arguably more technical, is it realistic for farmers to broaden their skill base? Few businesses would send 100% of their employees to training at any one time, yet that is effectively what farming businesses have to do. In addition, there is the challenge that farmers would be developing skills that may be little utilised on a day to day basis, so turning learning from training into standard behaviour does represent a hurdle.
It is beyond dispute that the knowledge and skills required to grow crops or raised livestock are essential for individual farmers but competitiveness and resilience also require management skills – in a broad business sense – and this is an area of neglect where farming is concerned. The reason for the neglect can largely be explained by the industry’s dependence on government support. Farmers as a group, with many notable exceptions, do not display the management skills that are commonly found amongst senior managers in non-farming businesses. It is not viewed as a priority by farmers, their representatives or the government. Yet there is a fundamental conflict between the government’ desire for farm businesses to become not only more competitive and resilience but also less reliant on public support and its lack of emphasis on building the management skills of farmers. The starting point in discussing competitiveness and resilience must be the willingness and opportunities for farmers to obtain necessary levels of broad management skills such as accounting, finance, marketing and people skills.