Things Have Changed On The Farm

“There are kids starving in _________.”

–    Pat Heston, who filled the blank with “China” and Dick Heston, who filled the blank with “Africa,” circa 1965ish – 1978ish

“Here’s the problem we face:  We live on a planet of 7 billion people that is projected to have more than 2 billion more mouths to feed by the middle of the century.”

–     Christopher Mims, in his “Keywords” column in the August 10, 2015 Wall Street Journal

When Mom and Dad would toss the quote above out, I would (smart-ass that I was / am) suggest that we “box it up and send it to them.”

It turns out, almost 50 years later, that the food isn’t the most valuable part of the equation any more.

Whether or not you had the advantage of growing up on a farm (imagine how easy the “talk” was for my parents…we had livestock…) understanding how the farming game is played today is a pretty incredible eye-opener.  I have many friends who are still in the trade.  I have new friends who are leveraging the very subject matter Mims covers in today’s column.

It’s a pretty compelling exercise in evaluating our appetites for change in our companies, regardless of the industry they serve.

Mims likens the shift to data-driven analytics and self-driving tractors (seriously, folks, John Deere is almost a full generation ahead of Tesla on this topic!) to the farming industry finally getting it’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) software — a market that has existed in manufacturing and services industries for much of the last 30+ years.  So, there are two parts to the lesson; sometimes we need to wait for the right time to make the change, like the farming industry has, and sometimes we need to predict and be ahead of the change, like John Deere has.

The constant, of course, is change.  And if you’ll read Mims’ column with that in mind — regardless of whether your just a consumer of food, or a provider — something tells me your perspective will widen, possibility thinking will ensue and a difference will be made.

In other words, things have changed on the farm.  How can we best understand and learn from that change?