The wages of frustration

I am still in rural NSW at the farm where I grew up.  The weekend was a reunion of sorts for my three sisters, their manifold children and me.  It's taken me a while to adjust to sleeping in the deafening silence of the Australian bush after inner London but that absence of noise is one of the things that I am here to rediscover.

On Saturday my brother-in-law gave me the tour of his cattle-raising business.  He's made a number of quite radical changes to the farm since my father has stepped back.  He and my sister are enthusiastic adherents to a more holistic approach to agriculture that is quite close to hard-core environmentalism in terms of protecting  pastures and (especially) soil quality*.  To this layman's eyes it seems as if they're on the right track but they'll only know for sure after a few hard years of poor rainfall and depressed cattle prices.

It's easy to look good in the good times.

And this is something that I'm not sure that my brother-in-law, a smart, hard-working man, quite gets yet.  An understanding of the meaning of prosperity is hard to come by.  If you take the long view of a business in any established industry (and none are more established than food production) then a trendline will emerge; a sense of what a good operator can reasonably achieve with his particular assets can be established.  I say 'established' because it takes time for these trendlines to solidify; no one knows what the DNA sequencing industry will look like yet.

Many companies and most Headcount: 1 / freelancer types misinterpret prosperity.  If you treat the good things (it rained, my client got a big promotion, I got the part in the hot new movie) as luck or even as 'just rewards for all my hard work' then that prosperity is mispriced: -

The good years must compensate you for the emotional damage wrought by the bad ones

None of us gets to relive those bad years but with more money in our pockets.  We don't get that time back.  Our health and the wellbeing of our relationships with family will inevitably have been damaged by both the frustration of not having succeeded yet and the quiet terror of not knowing if you're actually going to succeed at all.  When you hear that someone's eventual success 'feels hollow' it means that the bad years were 'not worth it' (or mispriced).

Hopefully my brother-in-law has it right.  Like many smart farmers of his generation he is adamant about carving out time for his other passions: his family and campdrafting, a very difficult, peculiarly Australian rodeo event.  But the proof will be in whether or not he manages to keep up these other aspects of his life when beef prices tank and the rain refuses to fall.

The current good season will have to pay for some future time of heartbreak and frustration whether he knows it or not.

* This is not to say that my father didn't have a keen appreciation of the relationship between his agricultural practices and his land.  He did.  However, to an outsider it does seem that the thinking has moved even in the last ten years.  Even though he doesn't use that language, my father was a custodian of his land, which is more than you can say for most farmers in most parts of the world.