If you are thinking of setting up your own farming business, you probably already know that it is a difficult industry to get into with long working hours and often small margins making it not for the faint-hearted.
If you plan to go ahead anyway, then you are surely committed to putting in the hours and doing what needs to be done. It would be awful, then, if you were to make a mistake that ruins your chance of agricultural success.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few common business mistakes farmers make in the hopes that you can avoid them in your own farming business:
Not having a solid business plan
If you do not have a solid business plan, then you will quickly find your costs spiraling and your ability to make money vanishing. Ask any agricultural accountants and they will tell you about the many new farmers they have worked for who have not thought about the cost of feed or how they are going to sell all of those sheep at market, only to find their businesses crashing and dying before they have even got started. Do not be like them and get good financial advice, before drawing up a solid business plan, before you even think about buying that farm and setting up business.
Running it as a hobby
So many people like the idea of working the land and growing the apples they love or rearing the pigs they enjoy so much, and there is nothing wrong with that, but as we said above, farming is hard work, and if you want to succeed, you need to take it seriously, You also need to ensure you are making commercially viable decisions, so even if you dream of growing heirloom tomatoes, you might find that growing potatoes would net you more money, and a failure to recognize that could end in disaster.
Not putting the work in
Agricultural work can be grueling. You cannot expect to work 9-5 and have everything down., You need to be up at the crack of dawn to milk the cows and feed the sheep, then you need to work the fields, harvest the produce, go to market, and a million other things in between. If you slack even a little, you will quickly find that you are out of your depth. Of course, you can and should hire help where possible, but as the business owner, you need to be heavily involved, especially in those early days.
Not measuring productivity
Farming is like any other business and the more productive it is, the more fruitful it will be for you. In order to know how productive you are, you need to constantly measure everything from egg production to hours spend sewing seeds, and then you need to look for ways to improve upon that whether by using automated agricultural tools or hiring more farmhands. You cannot simply plod along and expect to be a success.
Farming is not an easy business to get into, but if you can avoid the above mistakes, you will stand a much better chance of succeeding and setting up a thriving business that will build a better future for you and your family. Good luck.
