Craving certainty
When visiting the family farm I spent a few hours driving around the place with my brother-in-law. He's a thirtysomething guy who spent his twenties on the other side of the farm gate working as a grain trader. He is a smart, hardworking and independently-minded guy who is always open to new ideas but one who also craves certainty in an uncertain world.
He has access to experienced counsel from my father and his own parents but the combination of relative inexperience, an impulse for independence and a conflicting need for greater certainty is still a potentially deadly one.
Farming* is infamously fickle. My brother-in-law has to deal with a raft of totally uncontrollable variables: the weather, bushfires and other environmental factors; as well as stock, fuel and fertiliser prices, which are in turn influenced by macroeconomic factors such as interest and exchange rates. Conversely, he has a high degree of long-term control over capital investment in water supply, fencing and herd genetics and total short-term control over what cattle he buys and sells and where on the farm they'll graze.
From time to time he makes bad calls but always admits as much. Still, owning up to your mistakes is necessary for small business success but it isn't sufficient.
Recently he's happened on a system called Holistic Farm Management and he spent most of our farm tour expounding its virtues as a way of reducing the manifold uncertainty he's facing. With his permission I put on my 'consultants' hat' and quizzed him about the system.
As I understand it Holistic Farm Management is the idea that protecting the long-term health of your pasture is a higher priority than maximising the short-term value of your herd. The implication is that a farmer takes a whole-of-farm approach to pasture management and regulates stock numbers accordingly. The corollary being that the day-to-day market price for beef is mostly ignored.
The system is espoused by a local guru who alternates between saying that Holistic Farm Management is simply long-standing common sense (my father's position) and that it's an agricultural revolution waiting to happen (what my brother-in-law wants to hear). The spiel also includes a pitch for grasslands to be recognised (and rewarded) as carbon sinks in the global warming debate and a quasi-historical analysis of the carrying capacity of the Serengeti.
My layman's assessment of Holistic Farm Management is that it is a worthwhile philosophy overlaid with a dangerously rigid system based on arbitrary inputs (ie self-rating your paddocks to decide on carrying capacity) and insisting on either slavish adherence to a potentially misbegotten annual workplan or an unwieldy global reassessment that renders learnings from past experience elusive at best and at worst totally invalid.
As a guru in a vastly different field I won't comment on the rhetoric but I am critical of the choice of target market: younger farmers like my brother-in-law who just want to drink the Kool-Aid. Any Kool-Aid.
* Or perhaps I should refer to it 'ranching' as these days the business is almost 100% beef cattle