You Can't Buy Success

You can buy tools, or access land, or hire people, to increase your likelihood of success. But you can’t buy success.

Too often, we think that that one tool (one field, one person) will prove to be a game changer. But they almost never turn out that way.

The real game changers are:

• Farming skills – the real nuts-and-bolts knowledge gained through years of experience about how to get the work done.
• Acquired instincts – the year-over-year acquisition of that gut feeling that tells you when you need to plant instead of cultivate, harvest instead of transplant, or get back home to roll down the sides on the greenhouse.
• Real markets – where enough people are willing to spend enough money to buy a quality-differentiated food product.
• Business management systems – the development of systems on the farm that keep the important work of sales, employee management, and financial record-keeping and decision-making on track so that you can focus on farming.
• Knowing what success looks like – understanding what healthy crops, weed-free fields, and properly prepared produce actually look like. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t create it.
• Getting it right – you can spend all of the money you want, but if you (or your crew) overwater your transplants, drive the tractor crookedly down the row, don’t set the transplanter right, or don’t provide workers with the guidance they need to perform their jobs correctly, you may as well flush that same money down the toilet.

It’s easy to look at another farm and see their shiny tractors, fancy packing house, or automatic watering system and misidentify these as the source of their success. More often, success is the result of the unglamorous work of getting better at the game, rather than chasing after game changers.

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