Management

Here's a Sign Your Management Team Isn’t On It’s ‘A Game’

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 18:59:15 GMT

Take a look at your operation. Is just one person doing all the work? While it might seem that way at times, the answer is most likely “no.”

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They are done by a team of people,” says Liz Griffiths, a human-resource consultant in market development for Encore Consultants. “But the important part is that that team needs to be effective.”

Utilizing an effective management team can help you. As the owner or leader of your business, spend less time on the non-urgent and non-important tasks or duties that pop up every day. It provides you with an opportunity to share some of the responsibility and delegate those tasks to your management team. But in order to spend more time on the important tasks, you first must understand where you’re currently spending your time.

Where Are You Spending Your Time?

(Farm Journal)

According to Griffiths, our tasks can be split into four different categories – Important urgent, important non-urgent, urgent non-important and non-urgent non-important.

Important Urgent

“Most of us default to doing the urgent tasks first,” Griffith says. “The problem is if that’s all you’re doing, you’re not able to accomplish the important tasks.”

Important urgent are the tasks that need your immediate attention and cannot be delayed. No matter how much you plan ahead and avoid procrastination, crisis will still pop up. To combat these time suckers, Griffith suggests leaving some time in your schedule to handle unexpected issues.

Important Non-Urgent

According to Griffith, you need to spend the majority of your time on important but non-urgent tasks as they assist with the long-term planning and strategy for your business.

“These are the activities that help you achieve your personal and professional goals and complete the important work that you need to do,” Griffith says. “You need to make sure that you have plenty of time to do these tasks, so they don’t become urgent.”

Urgent Non-Important

“Distractions are urgent but not very important,” Griffith says. “These activities on a daily basis may even be somewhat enjoyable, but these activities are things that stop you from achieving your goals and prevent you from completing the important work.”

Take the time to ask yourself, “Can someone else be doing this? Can someone else assist me so I can get on to the more important goals of my business?”

As the owner of leader of your business, you most likely experience your fair share of interruptions throughout the day. Employees come to you to complain, others enjoy too much small talk and by the end of the day, you wonder where all of your time has gone.

“It’s great to have an open-door policy and you should,” Griffith says. “But in order to get your tasks done, especially the important non-urgent tasks, you need to set aside specific time for that.”

Non-Urgent Non-Important

“These are literally activities with little or no value to your long-term or short-term success,” Griffith notes. “They’re just a distraction and most of the could probably just be avoided.”

If you are spending the majority of your time in quadrants one, three and four, maybe you need to reevaluate your management team.

Identify Your Team

After you’ve discovered where the majority of your time is going, it’s time to identify the team members who can help you accomplish your goals.

“Not everybody should be on your management team,” Griffith says. “Just because they are family doesn’t make it automatic that they are on your management team.”

According to Griffiths, one of the first things you should think about is if these people share the same core values as your business. You want to make sure you have the right people with the right values. These values will determine how you and your employees will run the farm to meet your vision and your mission. They set the principles, values and provide a moral compass for your people and can help you decide the right course of action, establish a basis for decision making and give you some guidance on hiring, rewarding, discipling and even firing employees.

“Some people are not team players and they don’t want to be involved, and that’s okay! You still need those employees, but you don’t need them on your management team because they aren’t going to help move your business forward,” Griffith explains.

G.W.C.

When adding a member to your management team, it’s important to make sure they have these basic qualities:

Get it – They understand what you’re talking about when you explain an idea, a change to procedure or goal and follow up by doing the job right. They train other and lead by example.

Want it – Does he or she genuinely want a seat on the management team? They must understand and embrace the goals of the business and are willing take the steps to achieve those goals.

Capacity - Does he or she have the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional capacity to do this job? Additionally, do they have the time and the knowledge to get it done right?

“Before you give anybody a seat on the management team, he or she must get it, want it, and have the capacity to do the job,” Griffith says. “If any one of those three is a no, it’s never going to work.”

Your team should be composed of solid team members who embrace your core values, communicate effectively, are willing to develop and achieve your goals and have the ability to lead others. If you can identify these people, you may be able to add a few more hours to your day.

“Why not share the workload? Why not encourage ideas and innovation? Why not improve morale?” Griffith asks. “Why not complete all the tasks more effectively, leaving you some time to focus on the business. An effective management team can be a really useful tool for you and your business.”

5 Ways COVID-19 Has Transformed the Food Supply Chain

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 02:11:57 GMT

In less than two months, the COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted the food supply chain. As stay-at-home orders began rolling out, panic set in. Grocery aisles were emptied, restaurants closed, and the farm-to-fork food chain saw links start to snap.

Some impacts were instantaneous, while others are slowly emerging. Farmers are quickly adapting to these challenges so their products can safely and efficiently travel from farm to the hands of consumers. Here are just a few of the ways COVID-19 is recasting the supply chain.

1. The blueprint of food demand changed on a dime.

Once schools and restaurants closed their doors and consumers rushed to stock up, pressure points emerged across the food chain.

Take milk for example. Around half of demand is from restaurants and 10%-15% from schools and institutions, explains Rob Barley, owner of Star Rock Farms in Conestoga, Pa.

“So, you’re left with 30% of demand, which probably doubled, but you’re still only at 60% to 70% of your total demand,” says Barley, whose operation includes 1,500 dairy cows, 100,000 finisher hogs, a 2,000-head beef feedlot and 13,000 acres of row crops.

Between the transformation in demand and the challenge of delivering the right products to the right places, milk started getting backed up in a hurry, he says. As a result, some farmers were forced to dump milk .

Restaurants require different types and quantities of ag products. With restaurants closed or at least needing significantly less amounts of products, processors had to scramble to change packaging and transportation.

“You can’t just change the processing setup overnight,” Barley explains.

That left some products without a home. For instance, he says, some of the extra value processors of fluid milk receive is cream, since a lot of milk goes as 1% or 2%. “A lot of the cream goes into restaurants, so that demand disappeared overnight.”

The same bottlenecks were created for the produce industry, says Shay Myers, CEO of Owyhee Produce in Nyssa, Ore. The third-generation family farm is one of the country’s largest vertically integrated onion farms. They also produce asparagus and sweet potatoes.

“Around 70% to 80% of our valley’s onion production goes to processing for food service or directly to food service,” he says. “That business dropped off immediately. Stores wanted consumer packs of 2 lb., 3 lb. or 5 lb. bags. Our operation is set up for only about 20% of our production to go into 3 lb. bags. We don’t have the infrastructure to make that immediate change.”

While they were able to retool some old machinery to capture some of the business, Myers says that is only a temporary solution. They have had to dump or compost millions of pounds of onions in the last few weeks.

2. Most food banks aren’t equipped to take mass volumes of straight-from-the-farm products.

Farmers and producers would be quick to donate their products instead of dumping or disking them up. Yet, it’s not that simple.

After shutdowns occurred, many restaurants emptied their coolers and donated what food they had to food banks, Myers says. So, food banks were full. Now they could use product, but getting them straight from farms takes logistics, time and money.

“Our onions are in a bulk state,” he says. “For us to convert that to a 50-lb. unit to go to the food bank essentially costs another $3 to $4 per unit of sale. So, you’re going to double your loss to convert it to a package to give it away.”

3. The livestock pipeline’s long tail creates ongoing bottlenecks.

Many pork and beef processing plants are running at below-normal levels as they deal with the ongoing ramifications of COVID-19. As a result, bottlenecks emerged.

“For every week that goes by, we are backing cattle up,” says Jeff George, manager of Finney County Feedyard in Garden City, Kan. “The industry will struggle for quite some time to get the backlogs caught up. We’re at a time in the cattle business where we just have a lot of cattle around. Once the pipeline is full, it has a long tail.”

Industry analysts estimate over 500,000 head of cattle are backlogged in feedyards now, and the number will continue to grow until harvest plants are back to running at 100%. The same is true for hogs. (Read: Executive Order No Quick Fix For Bottlenecks )

“The hog production system is kind of like a water hose,” says Jimmy Tosh, CEO of Tosh Farms, Tosh Farms in Henry, Tenn. “You can turn the water off, but it doesn’t immediately turn off. The pigs will keep coming. With the processing plants below capacity, pigs back up on the farm.”

While Tosh says his operation, which includes 19,000 acres of row crops and 37,000 sows, has not been devastated yet, he’s worried about the future and others in the industry.

“We are backed up about 60 loads, but if that continues another two or three weeks, it will become a very serious situation,” he says. “I don’t know how well ever catch up without euthanasian. We’ve had a supply shock, now we’re having a processing shock.”

4. COVID-19 will likely change the meat processing industry.

As processing plants continue to close or adjust to allow for employee safety and social distancing, Tosh expects additional long-term changes.

“We’ll probably see plants get reconfigured,” he says. “One of the big issues we face in the ag industry is labor. This will accelerate the trend of more robotics in slaughterhouses.”

5. Consumers could make long-term changes to their eating habits.

USDA has pledged to purchase and distribute $100 million a month of fresh fruit and vegetables through the Buy Fresh Coronavirus Farm Assistance Program.

Myers see this as a benefit for produce growers.

“These will be distributed to a lot of families who likely didn’t eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables,” he says. “So, we think long-term this could be an advantage.”

Read More

COVID-19: Navigate A Way Forward

4 Bright Spots for Agriculture in the Post-Pandemic World