Will You Thrive?

Currently, most of agriculture is in a challenging situation, with interest rates just starting to be reduced, costs that are out of sight due to inflation since 2021, and regulations on labor & other business items that are, at best, onerous.

However, given those variables, are you positioning yourself to do more than just survive our current downturn? Are you positioning yourself to thrive? At the risk of sounding like the eternal optimist, let’s discuss what this will require.

Here are a few steps to implement:

• Skip the “worrying.” It will do absolutely nothing, except cloud your thinking. As Mark Twain so accurately stated, “Worrying is like paying interest on a debt you never owed.”
• Why not focus only on achieving greater levels of success. What do you need to do to make things better? Spend some time thinking about this.
• Fine tune your Revenues & Expenses. Are there particular items that you have been wanting to address but have been putting off?
• I just completed my first two Client Budgets for 2026. Their specific focus was on the areas of Labor Efficiency & its resulting costs, Feed Costs, Insurance (which they have now bid out…), and the length of Loan Amortization of term loans.
• Is it time to “pull the trigger” on Capital Expenditures with a definite payback? One of my Clients just initiated the installation of an $80,000 Sort Gate in their milk barn. With 2,600 milk cows, they figured the 1.5 lb/cow increase in production at $15/cwt would pay for it in 135 days. However, the bonus was on reducing their labor force by two men, a savings of $110-120,000/year!
• Another example was a Client who bought a slightly used 17’ disk that will reduce the number of trips across their field by 1/3, saving on fuel costs…
• As I suggested on bullet point #3 above, are there new Revenue sources you can add? One Client of mine is in the process of adding solar panels that will provide them with $95,000 savings/year on electricity. This is huge.

The biggest point here is that we all can do more than just survive, even in the toughest economic environments. Why just survive? That’s simply “Amateur Hour Stuff!” Let’s find ways to thrive, for as Winston Churchill so accurately stated:

“There ought to be ways of reforming a business, other than by merely putting more money into it.”

Let’s take your business to the next level!