Jordan Thomas, Ph.D., is assistant professor and beef cow-calf specialist at the University of Missouri.
This is a busy time of year. But then again, when is it not?
When bumping into a farm or ranch neighbor, have you ever noticed the conversation is peppered with a bunch of ____ing words? No, I am not talking about profanity (although I suppose that might depend on which neighbor you bump into). I am talking about gerunds, or words that end in -ing. We always share how we are calving, branding, weaning, doctoring, planting, harvesting, clipping, mowing, raking, baling, feeding, chopping, hauling, spraying… the list is endless. We are always busy with something.
Then there is another topic of conversation: costs. Whether it’s feed, fuel, fertilizer, lumber, or equipment, costs are up this year. All could be big challenges depending on how you operate. Those of you in the western U.S. and the northern Great Plains are also dealing with extreme drought on top of it all. Suffice it to say, it looks like a tough year to be in the cattle business.
The specific challenges we face from year to year vary. But at its core, the cattle business is the business of dealing with challenges. The planning it takes to get through these kinds of challenges is the real work of the business. All those gerunds—feeding, harvesting, baling, calving, etc—those things sure can keep us busy. But especially in a year with costs of production like this one, we need to make sure all that busyness doesn’t get in the way of running the business.
The Most Costly Input: Time
I am slowly learning that being “busy” isn’t necessarily something to be proud of. Reading Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less was particularly convicting for me, because the author frames busyness as failure. He argues that being busy is not evidence that we are being productive with our time but rather that we are failing to choose what we use our time to do. If we want to be effective and accomplish high-impact things, we have to actively choose to not spend our time accomplishing other lower-impact things. We have to proactively build open time in our schedules. We have to plan time for, well, planning.
The scary thing about busyness is that it robs us of the time and capacity to really get down to business. We only have so many hours in a day, and we only have so many days here in general. Time we spend on the busyness of our daily lives is time we don’t have to spend on the real business of our life. When we don’t build a life intentionally, with adequate time budgeted for all of the planning life requires, we will never get around to whatever it is we think is really important. Everything else, even though less important, will always be more urgent. I have gone through seasons of life feeling like I was constantly in triage mode, juggling a lot of relatively unimportant urgencies. Have you? If we aren’t careful, those seasons turn into years, and those years turn into our lives.
There’s more to life than the cattle business, but often our business structures are reflections of how we structure our life in general. What do you want your life to look like? What do you want your cattle business to look like? Is it a meaningful, thought-out business, or is it a bunch of busyness?
Business Decisions
I am a reproductive physiologist by training and a grass farmer at heart, so I can’t help but use a couple examples of ignored business opportunities in those areas.
In the most recent USDA National Animal Health Monitoring System survey from 2017, only about 12% of beef cattle producers report using artificial insemination. What is a main reason cited for not using AI? Time. Too busy. Now, I won’t argue everyone needs to be artificially inseminating cows necessarily, but general reproductive management for a shorter, tighter calving season has tremendous return-on-investment potential for cow-calf producers.
Surveys for the percentage of cattle producers that practice rotational grazing vary widely depending on how that is defined. But look out the window as you drive around, and do your own survey. It’s pretty unusual to see really good grazing management. Why is that? Again, I won’t argue everyone needs to move cattle every day necessarily. But the costs of stockwater development and a little fencing are pretty trivial when considering the return-on-investment potential of better-managed grazing. There are more grazing school opportunities than ever before, and there is no shortage of information online. Yet it seems like we can’t quite find the time to get started. Too busy baling hay, perhaps.
It is telling that the reasons given for not doing these things are usually more related to time than profitability. Do those sound like business decisions or busyness decisions?
We are often more skilled at production than at the business of production, so we can get locked into one particular production model pretty easily. Instead of taking the time to plan and replan what we actually do based on a profitable business model, we can easily fall into the trap of what I call “busyness as usual.” Here’s a challenge. As you go through your tasks at hand this week, ask yourself the following:
- Do I have a clear idea about what the job I am doing right now is worth?
- Do I have a clear idea about what my costs of doing the job are, including equipment, tools, fuel, etc?
- Do I have a clear idea about what kind of return potential this job produces?
- Did I have at least one other option for how to do the job?
- Did I consider not doing the job at all?
You may find you are doing a lot of work without having thought it through sufficiently. That’s not to say it isn’t work that needs to be done. It may be work that you would decide to do after making a well-thought-out business decision. But we can’t lie to ourselves and say we have thought things through or done the math if we have not. This year—and every year—there is just too much at stake.
If You Want to Be a Cowboy
A quote by the late Stan Parsons comes to mind: “If you want to be a cowboy, get a job—not a farm or ranch.” If that stings a little, read it again. There is nothing wrong with the day-to-day work that keeps a cowboy busy. But the ownership of a farm or ranch comes with business planning obligations. When you as the business owner are busy, no one else will take care of those obligations. Fixing fence and checking water is extremely important work. But that work is worth the fair market value of what it would cost to hire the job done, and we can’t make it pay us more just by staying busy at it. The business planning is our real responsibility and our greatest opportunity to actually create returns for the farm or ranch.
If the daily work is keeping you from the strategic planning it takes to have a profitable cattle business, it’s time to make some changes. We may decide to hire some help, do it differently, or just flat out stop doing it. Any one decision itself may not be critical, but it is when we dedicate time to spend in decision-making that we find real business opportunities. Don’t get caught up doing the day-to-day work of busyness while leaving the work of the business undone.
