Past experiences - Lesson 5 - ".. the opposite of expert advice
“Success
follows the opposite of expert advice”
The banter often received by a consultant has been that farm
success has come from the opposite of expert advice.
Though this is often said tongue-in-cheek, in other words it
means that each farm must set their own pathway for future success. It requires
people to “think for yourself”. Expert support services such as accountants,
agronomists and consultants can be quite wrong because of their own limited perspective.
The suggestion to think-for-yourself may be “intuitive” and insights from new psychology recognise that intuition
can be the best guide to decisions. For instance, practicing farmers are likely
to out-perform industry experts by using intuitive judgement.
Also, my Lesson Four adds to the model that successful farm
businesses invested heavily in the business – building the asset value, rather
than diversifying or accumulating cash. Cash was the priority in the past when
the banking industry-imposed credit-squeezes. Now, a longer-term view should be
possible and will reduce the stress of the short-term management cycle.
Lesson Three - “some farms seem to have good years every
year”, means that successful farms must have developed special skills. These
specific skills under-pin independent thinking (think for yourself, Lesson
Five) aimed at personal goals (Lesson Two).
The first Lesson from past experiences is that success in
broad-scale farming requires productivity improvement. Part of this improvement
in the past was delivered by a more active Department of Agriculture.
Commercial services now filling this role will first maximise their own profit,
including to decide how this profit will be shared with farmers.
In the future, such productivity improvement will be
complicated by the increased scale of farm assets which adds to the complexity
of farm decisions.
My proposed model will benefit from further development with willing farms.
